40324 Modern Information Retrieval

Course Description

Information retrieval is the process through which a computer system can respond to a user's query for text-based information on a specific topic. Information retrieval was one of the first and remains one of the most important problems in the domain of natural language processing. Web search is the application of information retrieval techniques to the largest corpus of text anywhere and it is the area in which most people interact with information retrieval systems most frequently. In this course, we will cover basic and advanced techniques for building text-based information systems, including efficient text indexing, Boolean and vector-space retrieval models, evaluation and interface, issues, information retrieval techniques for the web, including crawling, link-based algorithms, and metadata usage, document clustering and classification, traditional and machine learning-based ranking approaches, questiona and answering systems, and recommender systems.

Course Information

Required Texts

  1. [MRS] Christopher D. Manning and Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schutze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

  2. [HNG] Hang Li, Learning to Rank for Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing, Morgan & Claypool, 2011.

  3. [MC] Bhaskar Mitra and Nick Craswell, An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval, Foundations and Trends in Information Retrieval, Vol. 13, No. 1, pp. 1-126, 2018.

Grading Policy

  1. 25%: Mid-term exam (1402/08/13).

  2. 25%: Final exam (1402/11/02).

  3. 35%: Homeworks.

  4. 15%: Quiz.

Lecture Schedule


Lecture Lecture Date Topics Related Readings and Links Homeworks & Assignments Quizes
1 1402-07-03Introduction Chapter 1 of MRS
2
3
1402-07-08
1402-07-10
Boolean information retrieval
and document preprocessing
Chapters 1 & 2 of MRS
4 1402-07-15 Dictionaries and tolerant retrieval Chapter 3 of MRS
5 1402-07-17 Index Construction Chapter 4 of MRS
6 1402-07-22 Index compression Chapter 5 of MRS
7 1402-07-24 Vector space modelChapter 6 of MRS HW1 release Quiz 1
8 1402-07-29 Scores in a complete search system Chapter 7 of MRS
9 1402-08-01 Evaluation in information retrieval Chapter 8 of MRS
10 1402-08-06Relevance feedback and query expansion Chapter 9 of MRS
11 1402-08-08Probabilistic Information Retrieval Chapter 11 of MRS Quiz 2
12 1402-08-13 Mid-term exam
13 1402-08-15Language Models for Information RetrievalChapter 12 of MRS HW 1 deadline & HW 2 release
14
15
16
17
1402-08-20
1402-08-22
1402-08-27
1402-08-29
Probabilistic text classification
Vector space text classification
Chapters 13-15 of MRS
18
19
20
1402-09-04
1402-09-06
1402-09-11
Text clusteringChapters 16 & 17 of MRS

HW 2 deadline & HW 3 release
Quiz 3

21 1402-09-13Dimensionality reduction and feature selectionChapter 13 of MRS
22 1402-09-18 Learning to rank Chapters 1-3 of HNG
23 1402-09-20 Latent Semantic Indexing Chapter 18 of MRS
24
25
1402-09-25
1402-09-27
Web cralwing and searchChapters 19 & 20 of MRS
261402-10-02 Link Analysis Chapter 21 of MRS HW 3 deadline & HW 4 release Quiz 4
27
28
29
1402-10-04
1402-10-09
1402-10-11
Neural information retrieval
Some other related topics
MC
1402-10-23 HW 4 deadline
1402-11-02 Final exam At 9:00