Information Retrieval: Foundation and Trends
(Summer 2008, Dragon Star Course)

Instructor: ChengXiang Zhai

| Home | Basic Information | Schedule |
| Assignments | Proposal | Mini-TREC | Resources |



Tentative Schedule
Schedule may be updated. Please check for any update regularly
Date Morning Lecture (8:30-11:30)
(Foundation & Trends)
Afternoon Lecture (1:30-2:30)
(Research Methodology)
Notes
6/21 Sat Course overview, background review (probability, statistics, information theory, NLP)
Slides: ppt
Lecture Notes: Prob & Stat, Info Theory, NLP
Readings:
Bush 45, Rosenfeld's note on estimation, Rosenfeld's note on information theory
Introduction to IR research
Slides: ppt
6/22 Sun Information Retrieval Overview (part 1) (basic concepts, history, evaluation, vector space model)
Slides: ppt
Lecture Notes: text retrieval
Readings:
Singhal's review (Error), Review of IR models, TREC measures, Voohees' evaluation paper, Book chapters 6-8, Zobel & Moffat 98
Prepare yourself for research
Slides: ppt
Readings: Recommended readings for IR Research Students
Mini-TREC task specification (not quite finalized)
6/23 Mon Information Retrieval Overview (Part 2) (basic retrieval models, system implementation, applications)
Slides: ppt
Notes: Language Models for IR, IR System
Readings: Book-Ch1-5 , Book-Ch11-12 , Zhai & Laffert 04.
Find a good IR research topic
Slides: ppt

Assign #1out
6/24 Tue Statistical Language Models for IR (probabilistic retrieval models, KL-divergence model, special retrieval tasks)
Slides: ppt
Notes: Language Models, Language Models for IR
Readings: Rosenfeld 00, Zhai & Laffert 04, Zhai & Lafferty 01, Note on KL-div Retrieval Model
Formulate IR research problem and form hypotheses
Slides: ppt
Assign #2 out
6/25 Wed Modern Retrieval Frameworks (axiomatic, decision-theoretic)
Slides:ppt
Readings:
Zhai & Lafferty IPM 06, Hui Fang's dissertation
Final exam practice questions available
6/26 Thu Personalized Search & User Modeling (implicit feedback, explicit feedback, active feedback)
Slides: ppt
Readings: Shen et al. 05a, Shen et al. 05b, Shen et al. 05c, Tan et al. 06, Tan et al. 07, Wang & Zhai 07
Test/Refine research hypotheses
Slides: ppt
Proposal team due
6/27 Fri Natural Language Processing for IR (phrase indexing, dependency analysis, sense disambiguation, sentiment retrieval)
Slides:ppt
Readings:
Lewis & Sparck Jones 96, Smeaton 97, Zhai 97, Gao et al. 04, Zhang et al. 07
Write and publish an IR paper
Slides: ppt
6/28 Sat Guest lecture Reveal earning secrets of search engines , ppt Mini-TREC Phase I Task due extended
6/29 Sun Topic Models for Text mining (PLSA, LDA, extensions and applications)
Slides: ppt
Readings:
Hofmann 99, Mei & Zhai 06, Blei et al. 03
Proposal outline due
6/30 Mon Next generation search engines, course summary
Slides:ppt1,ppt2
Readings:
Book-Ch19-21 PageRank; Computation of PageRank; Burges et al. 06, Burges et al. 05, Cao et al. 06
Final Exam (1:30-4:30) Assigns #1, #2 due
7/5 Sat Research proposal due
7/21 Mini-TREC data sets ready
8/25 Mini-TREC Phase II Task due