Information Retrieval and Web Search
Lecturer: Dr. Ralf Krestel
Assistant: Julian Risch
The lecture takes place on Mondays, 11:00 to 12:30, and Wednesdays, 11:00 to 12:30, in G-E 15/16 on Campus III. Approximately after each two lectures there will be one exercise session.
This course will be offered in English!
Course Description
Finding Information is a key component in many applications: from recommending products on e-commerce platforms to diagnose cancer cells. Historically, information retrieval is tightly coupled with libraries. With the advent of computers and subsequently the internet, web retrieval and text search engines became the most prominent information retrieval domain.
In this course, we want to look at basic information retrieval concepts: indexing, retrieval models, querying, interfaces, evaluation. Further, we will have a look at current research trends focusing around machine learning to improve search. And finally, we look at web search, specifically at performance, crawling, link analysis, and social search.
Grading
- 30% Software Project (Teams of size two)
- 70% Final Exam
- Requirement for participation in the final exam is to reach 70% of the points in 7 out of the 8 homework assignments and at least 50% in the remaining one.
- The homework assignments should be worked on in the same teams of size two.
Resources
The slides and assignments can be found in the internal area. The submission system can be found here. Choose a newspaper here.
Schedule
| Date | Topic |
| 16.10.17 | Introduction, Architecture STARTS AFTER LIZ BLACKBURN'S TALK (~11:15-11:30) |
| 18.10.17 | Basics |
| 23.10.17 | Text Aquisition |
| 25.10.17 | Exercise1 |
| 30.10.17 | Text Transformation |
| 01.11.17 | Index Creation |
| 06.11.17 | Exercise 2 |
| 08.11.17 | Retrieval Models I |
| 13.11.17 | Retrieval Models II |
| 15.11.17 | Exercise 3 |
| 20.11.17 | User Interaction I |
| 22.11.17 | User Interaction II |
| 27.11.17 | Exercise 4 |
| 29.11.17 | Evaluation |
| 04.12.17 | Document Organization |
| 06.12.17 | Exercise 5 |
| 11.12.17 | Learning to Rank |
| 13.12.17 | Topic Models |
| 18.12.17 | Distributed Representation |
| 20.12.17 | Exercise 6 |
| 25.12.17 | Holiday |
| 27.12.17 | Holiday |
| 01.01.18 | Holiday |
| 03.01.18 | Holiday |
| 08.01.18 | Web Search |
| 10.01.18 | Performance |
| 15.01.18 | Exercise 7 |
| 17.01.18 | Link Analysis |
| 22.01.18 | Social Search |
| 24.01.18 | Exercise 8 |
| 29.01.18 | Personalization |
| 31.01.18 | Multimedia IR |
| 05.02.18 | Exercise 9 |
| 07.02.18 | Software Project Evaluation |
| 13.02.18 | Exam in HS 3 from 10:00 to 11:00 |
Textbooks
- Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice by W. Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman
- Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines by Stefan Büttcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, and Gordon V. Cormack
- Modern Information Retrieval by Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto
- An Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze