Syllabus of CS-463, Information Retrieval Systems, UofCrete

CS463 - Information Retrieval Systems
Syllabus (Spring 2006)
CS Department, University of Crete, Greece.

Rationale

Information Retrieval (IR) systems give access to large amounts of online information stored as text, images, speech or video, e.g., Web documents. IR systems should only retrieve those documents that are relevant to a user's interest but have to deal with the uncertainty of describing what a document is about and what a user is actually interested in.

Aims

This course aims at introducing the area of Information Retrieval and at examining the theoretical and practical issues involved in designing, implementing and evaluating Information Retrieval systems.

Objectives

By the end of this course the student should:

	understand the theoretical basis behind the standard models of IR (Boolean, Vector-space, Probabilistic and Logical models),
	understand the difficulty of representing and retrieving documents, images, speech, etc.,
	be able to implement, run and test a standard IR system,
	understand the standard methods for Web indexing and retrieval,
	understand how techniques from natural language processing, artificial intelligence, human-computer interaction and visualisation integrate with IR, and
	be familiar with various algorithms and systems.

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. An project will be also assigned during the term.

Topics

The course will cover the following topics:

Introduction to Information Retrieval
- Motivation
- Information Retrieval vs Data Retrieval
- Flashback
Models of Information Retrieval
- Boolean Model
- Vector Space Model
- Probabilistic Model
- Alternative Models
Retrieval Evaluation
- Recall and Precision
- Alternative Measures
- Reference Collections and Evaluation of IR systems
Query Languages for IR
- Keywords
- Boolean Queries
- Context Queries
- Natural Language Queries
- Structural Queries
Advanced Query Operations
- Relevance Feedback
- Query Expansion
- Automatic Local Analysis
- Automatic Global Analysis
Text Indexing, Preprocessing and File Organization
- Stopwards, stemming, thesauri
- File (Text) organization (invert,suff)
- Text statistics (properties)
- Text compression
Text Searching
- Knuth-Morris-Pratt
- Boyer-Moore family
- Suffix automaton
- Phrases and Proximity
Document Clustering
Multimedia Information Retrieval
- Similarity Queries
- Feature-based Indexing and Searching
- Spatial Access Methods
- Searching in Multidimensional Spaces
Parallel and Distributed IR
- Architectures MIMD and SIMD
- Collection Partitioning
- Source Selection
- Query Processing
- Peer-2-Peer Architectures and Systems
Meta-Ranking
- Integrated vs Isolated Methods
- Interleaving
- Voting
Web Search
- History of Web
- Indexing
- Spidering/Crawling
- Link Analysis (HITS, PageRank)
User Interfaces and Visualization