Instructor

Teaching Assistant

Time and Place

General Course Information

• Basic course information
• Course syllabus
• Information on course Java code
• Information on submitting projects

Textbook

Programming Projects

• Project 0: Optional Software Test (due 9/??)
• Project 1: Vector Space Retrieval (due 9/??)
• Project 2: Evaluating Performance of Query Operations (due 10/??)
• Project 3: Web Spidering and Link Analysis (due 11/??)
• Project 4: Text Categorization (due 12/??)

Exams

• Midterm (Thu. Oct. 17) (Equation sheet 1) (Perl Regex sheet)
  • Previous year's midterm in PDF
• Final (Fri. Dec. 13, 2-5PM) (Equation sheet 2) (Equation sheet 3) (Link analysis algorithms sheet) (Learning algorithms sheet)
  • Previous year's final in PDF

Powerpoint Presentations

1. Introduction
2. Boolean and Vector-Space Retrieval Models
3. Basic Tokenizing, Indexing, and Implementation of Vector-Space Retrieval
4. Performance Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems
5. Query Operations (Relevance Feedback / Query Expansion)
6. Query Languages
7. Text Properties and Languages
8. Web Search: Introduction
9. Web Search: Spidering
10. Web Search: Interfaces
11. Web Search: Link Analysis
12. Automated Text Categorization
13. Language-Model Based Retrieval
14. Automated Text Clustering
15. Recommender Systems
16. Information Extraction (Sequence Labeling)
17. Concepts of Information Retrieval (Dr. Matt Lease's lecture)

Servlet Demos

• Simple Search Engine

Java Course Code

JavaDoc for Course Code

• All packages
• Vector-Space Retrieval
• Performance Evaluation
• Web Utilities
• Text Classifers
• Utilities

Java Information

• Sun Java Tutorial
• For Javadoc for the standard Java libraries see the Sun Java Platform API Specs.
• Java Servlet/JSP Tutorial

Related Courses

• Information Retrieval Course at UMass
• Web Search and Mining Course at Stanford
• Information Retrieval and Web Agents Course at Johns Hopkins
• Intelligent Information Retrieval Course at DePaul

Miscellaneous Links

• ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR)
• Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)
• World-Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
• On-line textbook on Information Retrieval by C. J. van Rijsbergen (1979)
• Information Retrieval Links
• UMass Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval
• Bibliography on Zipf's Law
• Web Robots Pages
• Prosecuting Bots for Trespassing (e.g. Ebay vs. Bidder's Edge) (or try a Google search on "robots.txt lawsuit")
• Search Engine Watch
• Search Tools for Web Sites
• History of Search Engines
• Scientific American articles on XML and the Semantic Web
• Web IR and IE
• Reading List on Machine Learning and Information Retrieval
• Repository of Online Information Sources Used in Information Extraction Tasks
• Bibliography on Automated Text Categorization
• Recommender Systems Links
• NY Times article on Text Mining
• Wired article on Google's Algorithm

Relevant Books Written for the General Public

• Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web, by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, 1999.
• Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft , Joshua Quittner, Michelle Slatalla, 1998.
• The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture , John Battelle, 2005.
• The Google Story, David Vise and Mark Malseed, 2005.
• Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know , Randall Stross, 2008.
• In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives , Stephen Levy, 2011.
• Linked: The New Science of Networks: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Science, Business and Everyday Life, A.L. Barabasi, 2002. (book on the statistical properties of the Web and other graph structures in nature)
• The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson, 2006. (book on how Zipfian power laws also describe the range of choices available to consumers on the web)