As the amount of online textual information (e.g., web pages, email, news articles, office documents, and scientific literature) grows explosively, it is increasingly important to develop tools to help us manage and exploit the huge amount of information. Web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, are good examples of such tools, and they are now an essential part of everyone's life.
As the underlying science of search engines, information retrieval (IR) has been studied since several decades ago, but the huge impact of the research results of the information retrieval community had not appeared until the birth of the Web. Now information retrieval has become a very active research area, attracting more and more attention recently. The purpose of this course is two-fold: (1) Introduce the foundational concepts, principles, and techniques of IR and review a representative set of frontier topics. (2) Discuss the general methodology and specific strategies for doing research. Students will learn the basic principles and algorithms for managing text information and be explosed to some advanced frontier topics. They will also obtain handson handson experience on writing a research proposal and conducting IR research.
The course contains a series of long morning lectures covering foundational and frontier topics in IR and short afternoon lectures covering IR research methodology. There will be two assignments and one final exam. Students will also form groups to finish a research proposal and course project.