Selected Topics in Information Retrieval

Welcome to our Master Seminar on Information Retrieval!

News

27.10.08: Topics allocation and final schedule.
21.10.08: Slides of the first meeting are online.
25.09.08: Seminar web page is online!

Organization

This seminar is organized by: Mohammed AbuJarour, Jens Bleiholder and Alexander Albrecht.
Regular meeting will be held weekly on Tuesday 15:15 – 16:45.
Location: HPI A-2.1.
The first organizational meeting will be on Tuesday 21.10.2008.
To register in this seminar, please, send an email with your favorite 3-topics to (Mohammed AbuJaror) before 23.10.2008.
In order to be an active participant in the seminar, we recommend a sufficient background in Database, Data Structures and Algorithms , Linear Algebra, and Probability Theory.
Papers will be available online.

Contents of the Seminar

In this seminar, we will discuss interesting topics and publications in "Information Retrieval". We will consider XML Information Retrieval that deals with semi-structured and unstructured data, Search and Web IR , Indexing methods, as well as, Information Filtering, Clustering, classification, supervised and unsupervised learning.

Requirements to get the certificate

You are expected to show up in all sessions. If you cannot attend for some reason, let us know per email beforehand.
Give a talk in English about your topic. You have 45 minutes to explain the topic to your fellow students, who will invest the next 15-minutes to discuss and comment on the topic and the talk.
Participate actively in all talks. Discussion and challenging questions are highly-encouraged and they affect your final grade.
Submit a report on your assigned topic. The report should discuss (not summerize) the assigned work/material, showing its strengths and weaknesses, your suggestions and comments ...
Your final grade is affected by your talk, your understanding of the topic (answering the challenging questions!), your report, your participation in the discussion and asking questions and your attendance.

Schedule

Tuesday 15:15 – 16:45 in A-2.1

21.10.2008: Organizational session.
Introduction and organization.
Speaker: Mohammed AbuJarour, Jens Bleiholder and Alexander Albrecht.
Slides: Mohammed's slides, Jens's slides, Alexander's slides.

25.11.2008: Introduction
Foundations of Information Retrieval.
Speaker: Mohammed AbuJarour
Slides: Introduction to IR.

2.12.2008: XML Information Retrieval (Mohammed AbuJarour)
Xiaoguang Li, Jian Gong, Daling Wang, Ge Yu. An Effective and Efficient Approach for Keyword-Based XML Retrieval. WAIM 2005: 56-67
Speaker: Daryna Bronnykova
Slides: PDF

09.12.2008: Models for document & query representation (Mohammed AbuJarour)
- Vector Space Model
- Binary Independence Model
- Language Model
Related chapters in "Introduction to Information Retrieval" by Manning et al. and A language modeling approach to information retrieval – Ponte, Croft - 1998
Speaker: Ziawasch Abedjan.
Slides: PDF
16.12.2008: Information Filtering / Recommendation (Jens Bleiholder)
Badrul Sarwar, George Karypis, Joseph Konstan, and John Riedl. 2001. Item-Based Collaborative Filtering Recommendation Algorithms . In Proceedings of WWW10 (Hong Kong, May 1-5, 2001). And some additional related papers.
Speaker: Michael Leben
Slides: PDF
Weihnachtsferien
13.1.2009: Search and Web Information Retrieval -1 (Mohammed AbuJarour)
Zakos, J. and Verma, B. 2006. A Novel Context-based Technique for Web Information Retrieval. World Wide Web 9, 4 (Dec. 2006), 485-503.
Speaker: Philipp Maschke
Slides: PDF
20.1.2009: Search and Web Information Retrieval -2 (Mohammed AbuJarour)
Turpin, A., Tsegay, Y., Hawking, D., and Williams, H. E. 2007. Fast generation of result snippets in web search. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in information Retrieval (Amsterdam, The Netherlands, July 23 - 27, 2007). SIGIR '07. ACM, New York, NY, 127-134.
Speaker: Felix Geller
Slides: PDF
3.2.2009: Classification¹ (Mohammed AbuJarour)
Chapter 13 from "Introduction to Information Retrieval" by Manning et al.
Speaker: Dustin Lange
10.2.2009: Clustering¹ (Mohammed AbuJarour)
Chapter 16/17 from "Introduction to Information Retrieval" by Manning et al.
Speaker: Murat Knecht

¹	Your presentation should include: Experimental results of an exemplary implementation using one of the presented approaches.

References and useful material

“Introduction to Information Retrieval” , Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Cambridge University Press. 2008.http://www.informationretrieval.org.