Information Retrieval and Web Search

Course Information

Recommended textbook

Introduction to Information Retrieval by C. Manning, P. Raghavan, and H. Schütze. Cambridge University Press, 2008

Syllabus

  • Introduction: Goals and history of IR. The impact of the web on IR. The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in IR.
  • Basic IR Models: Boolean and vector-space retrieval models; ranked retrieval; text-similarity metrics; TF-IDF (term frequency/inverse document frequency) weighting; cosine similarity.
  • Basic Tokenizing Indexing, and Implementation of Vector-Space Retrieval: Simple tokenizing, stop-word removal, and stemming; inverted indices; efficient processing with sparse vectors; python implementation.
  • Experimental Evaluation of IR: Performance metrics: recall, precision, and F-measure; Evaluations on benchmark text collections.
  • Query Operations and Languages: Relevance feedback; Query expansion; Query languages.
  • Text Representation: Word statistics; Zipf's law; Porter stemmer; morphology; index term selection; using thesauri. Metadata and markup languages (SGML, HTML, XML).
  • Web Search:
    Search engines; spidering; metacrawlers; directed spidering; link analysis (e.g. hubs and authorities, Google PageRank); shopping agents.
  • Text Categorization and Clustering: Categorization algorithms: naive Bayes; decision trees; and nearest neighbor. Clustering algorithms: agglomerative clustering; k-means; expectation maximization (EM). Applications to information filtering; organization; and relevance feedback.
  • Recommender Systems: Collaborative filtering and content-based recommendation of documents and products.
  • Information Extraction and Integration: Extracting data from text; XML; semantic web; collecting and integrating specialized information on the web.

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