Winter 2013

CSI4107: Information Retrieval and the Internet

Instructor: Diana Inkpen

Office: SITE 5015
E-mail: diana@site.uottawa.ca Telephone: 562-5800 ext. 6711

Meeting Times and Locations

See Infoweb

Office Hours: TBA or by email appointment, in SITE 5015.

Overview

Basic principles of Information Retrieval. Indexing methods. Query processing. Linguistic aspects of Information Retrieval. Agents and artificial intelligence approaches to Information Retrieval. Relation of Information Retrieval to the World Wide Web. Search engines. Servers and clients. Browser and server side programming for Information Retrieval.
Pre-Requisites (CSI3103 or ELG3300), (CSI3125 or CSI2115 or SEG2101) or permission from the instructor.

Announcements:

The final marks are posted in the Balckboard Learn system. Here is the solution to exam. If you need to see your exam, there will be office hours Monday April 29, 2-4pm.
Exam preparation page
Assignment 2 is posted.
Midterm preparation page
The deadline for A1 was extended till Feb 15. A new version of the corpus for Assignment 1 was made available here. Please use this version instead of en.zip because it is more complete.
Assignment 1 is posted.

Evaluation Students will be evaluated on:

Two written and programming assignments / group project (30%). The programming language will be Java.
Note: The assignments will be submitted electronically through Virtual Campus (the new version called Blackboard Learning). No late assignments are accepted.
Midterm exam (15%)
One in-class Presentation(15%) (See Presentations schedule)
Final exam (40%)
Bonus points for class participation

Timetable (no late assignments are considered)

Assignment 1, due Mon Feb 11, extended till Fri Feb 15, 22:00.
In-class presentation. (See Presentations schedule)
Midterm (Fri, March 1, 14:30, in class) Solutions
Assignment 2, due Mon, April 1, extended till April 8, 22:00.
Final exam (during exam period)

Introduction to Information Retrieval, by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schutze, Cambridge University Press, 2008 (online version available)

Other books:
Information Retrieval, by D. Grossman and O. Frieder, Springer, 2004 (second edition).
Another online book Information Retrieval, by C. J. van Rijsbergen (1979)
Modern Information Retrieval, by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, 1999. Companion website to this book.

Course notes (additional reading, pdf file)

Syllabus (subject to minor modifications) (The lecture slides will be in pdf format, you can read them with Acrobat Reader)
Credit: some of the lecture notes are initially designed by prof. Ray Mooney, University of Texas Austin

Week 1: Jan 9, 11
Preliminaries. Introduction: Goals and history of IR. The impact of the web on IR. The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in IR.
The Internet and the WWW: History of Internet. TCP/IP. IP addresses. WWW. HTTP. HTML. Web servers and clients.
Links: Top search engines in US in 2010 Search engine watch TREC CLEF

Week 2: Jan 16, 18
Basic IR Models: Boolean and vector-space retrieval models; ranked retrieval; text-similarity metrics; TF-IDF (term frequency/inverse document frequency) weighting; cosine similarity.
Slides on Implementation of Vector Space Model Extra slides on cosine measure Example discussed in class Solution to the example.

Week 3: Jan 23, 25
Experimental Evaluation of IR: Performance metrics: recall, precision, and F-measure; Evaluations on benchmark text collections.
Interpolated Precision. Example discussed in class Solution to example.
Week 4: Jan 30, Feb 1
Query Operations and Languages: Relevance feedback; Query expansion; Query languages.
Example discussed in class Solution (do it by yourself first)
Links: WordNet Corpus-based Similarity Demo Dekang Lin's Demos WordNet::Similarity

Week 5: Feb 6, 8
Image Information Retrieval
Links: Content-based image retrieval ESP Game for labeling images
Text Representation: Word statistics; Zipf's law; Porter stemmer; morphology; index term selection; using thesauri. Metadata and markup languages (SGML, HTML, XML).
More slides on Web markup languages: HTML, XML, XHTML, RDF, OWL Links: Semantic Web Example: term frequencies in Tom Sawyer

Week 6: Feb 13, 15
Web Search: Search engines; spidering; metacrawlers; directed spidering; link analysis (e.g. hubs and authorities, Google PageRank); shopping agents.
Extra slides on Link Analysis: the hubs and authorities algorithm, and the PageRank algorithm.    PageRank
Hubs and authorities example discussed in class Solution (do it by yourself first) PageRank examples
Links: Google Tech Overview    Google - Parallel architecture    Slides about the Google 1998 paper

Week 7: Feb 20, 22    Study Break (Reading Week, no classes)
Week 8: Feb 27, Mar 1    Wed, Feb 27, Midterm revision, Fri, Mar 1, in class: Midterm

Week 9: Mar 6, 8
Text Categorization : Categorization algorithms: decision trees; Rocchio; k-nearest neighbor, Naive Bayes. Links: Weka data mining tool
Extra slides on Naive Bayes

Week 11: Mar 20, 22
Text Clustering Clustering algorithms: agglomerative clustering; k-means. Applications to information filtering and organization.
Examples of text classification and clustering discussed in class Solution (do it by yourself first)
Week 10: Mar 13, 15
Advanced IR Models: Probabilistic models; Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI); Language Models.
Extra slides on LSI. Language Models for Information Retrieval.

Week 12: Mar 27, 29
Question Answering : Retrieving precise short answers to natural language queries.
QA System Demos. Slides about IBM's Watson. Links to IBM's Watson Deep QA Answers Ottawa Citizen article

Week 13: Apr 3, 5
Cross-Language IR
Exam revision