Information Retrieval Systems
INFO624, winter, 2005
College of Information Science and Technology
Drexel University

Time: 6:00 to 9:00pm Wednesdays
Classroom: Room 9, Rush Building
Instructor: Xia Lin
Office: Room 415, Rush Building
Office Hours: by appointments
Telephone: 215-895-2482
Email: xlin@cis.drexel.edu

Course page: http://research.cis.drexel.edu/classes/info624/

Objectives of the course
The objective of the course is to introduce students to the theoretical underpinnings of information retrieval (IR), an active and rapid growing branch of applied computational science. Main topics of the course include document representation, document indexing, digital information storage, retrieval, and distribution. Emphasis is given to application of IR theories and practices to web indexing and web search engines. Specifically, this course will help students

• to identify basic theories and analysis tools as they apply to information retrieval
• to develop understanding of problems and potentials of current IR systems
• to learn and appreciate different retrieval algorithms and systems
• to apply various indexing, matching, organizing, and evaluating methods to IR problems
• to become aware of current experimental and theoretical IR research

Methodology

Lectures and discussions are primary techniques used to achieve the objectives of the course. Completion of the assigned reading and assignments is also essential to the learning process. Some group activities may be assigned during the term.

Textbooks:

Ricardo Baeza-Yates & Berthier Ribeiro-Neto  Modern Information Retrieval   New York: Addison-Wesley, 1999.

Other recommended books:

van Rijsbergen, C. J.  Information Retrieval. (Second Edition) Butterworths (Boston, MA), 1979. (Full text of the book is available on the web).

Frakes, W. B. & Baeza-Yates, R. Information Retrieval: Data Structures & Algorithms. Prentice Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ) (ISBN: 0-13-463837-9). 1992.

Policies

Students are expected to read assigned materials and to participate in class discussions and other activities. Assignments are generally due one week after they are assigned unless otherwise specified. Assignments MUST hand in before the class on the day they are due.  Assignments that are late will be penalized for 10% each section (for any reasons).  Other penalties may be applied for long overdue assignments. It is the student's responsibility to be present for exams. A make-up will only be given to students who miss exams under EXTREME circumstances.

Grades and assignments:

Grades for this course will be based on the following:

Final project 30 %
Midterm exam 30 %
Three assignments 30 %
Class participation & attendance 10%

Some other assignments or readings may be given throughout the term.

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Course Outline for INFO624, Winter 2003

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Week 1. Introduction -What is Information Retrieval
    (Jan. 5)

• Introduction
• Users and user's information needs
• Data, information and documents
• Past, present and future of IR
• Reading: Chapter 1.
• Reading:
• Short History of Information Retrieval and Libraries
• Rao, Ramana (2004) From IR to Search and Beyond. ACM Queue, 67-73.
• Lecture Notes
• Assignment 1: Review of Search Engines (assigned, due in two weeks)

Week 2. Models of Information Retrieval
   (Jan. 12)

• Inverted indexing
• Boolean logic
• Vector model
• Alternative models
• Models for browsing
• Reading: Chapter 2.
• Reference: Basic unix commands
• Lecture Notes
• Inverted Indexing Exercise

Week 3.  Retrieval Evaluation
(Jan. 19)

• Relevance
• Recall & Precision
• Similarity measure
• Evaluation of IR systems
• IR retrieval experiments
• Reading: Chapter 3.
• Assignment 2: Indexing Exercises
• Reference: English letter Statistics
• Reference: Word rankings in "Alice in Wonderland"
• Lecture Notes

Week 4. Query Languages and Query Operations
   (Jan. 26)

• Basic queries
• Structural queris
• Query expansion
• Reading: Chapter 4 & 5 (except 5.3 & 5.4)
• Lecture Notes

Week 5. Text Retrieval and Languages
   (Feb. 2)

• Word extraction
• Stop words
• stemming
• Word frequency counts
• Zipf's Law
• Reading: Chapter 6 & 7
• Reading: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon’s original paper)
• Assignment 3
• Lecture Notes

Week 6. Indexing and Searching
  (Feb 9)

• Inverted indexing
• Subject indexing and metadata
• Citation indexing
• Term associations & co-occurrences
• Midterm
• Reading: Chapter 8
• Lecture Notes

Week 7. Effectiveness Improvement Techniques
 (Feb. 16)

• Overview of some practical IR systems
• Statistical ranking
• User profiles
• Relevance feedback
• Reading:
• Lecture Notes

Week 8. User Interfaces and Visualization
 (Feb. 23)

• Browsing
• Interactive interfaces
• Retrieval experiments
• Lecture Notes (Knowledge Representation)
• Lecture Notes (Visualization)
• Reading: Chapter 10

Week 9.  IR Research and Future of IR Systems
 (March 2)

• Next generation of web search engines
• XML search engines
• Digital Libraries
• Reading: Chapter 13 & 15
• What do people want from information retrieval
• The seven ages of information retrieval
• Readings on future search engines
• Lecture Notes

Week 10. Final Project Presentation 

(March 9)

• Sample text collections
• Search engine review links
• SIGIR93.txt