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SIMS 202 Information Organization and Retrieval 

Lecture topics and assignments. Readings refer to Modern Information Retrieval (MIR) or The Organization of Information (OI), or to papers in the reader. Schedule is subject to change.

This schedule is subject to change. Readings are meant to be read in advance of the lecture for which they are shown.

Go directly to the current week.


Week 1:

Tues Aug 29
Lecture: Course Overview (MAH)
Reading: Borges and Dennett
Lecture Notes: View in Browser or Download
Assignment 1: What is Information? (due Aug 31)

Thurs Aug 31
Lecture: What is Information? (Including student responses and Borges) History of Information Search and Organization (RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 1, 3 Lecture Notes: Download
Homework: Assignment 1 is due.


Week 2:

Tues Sep 05
Lecture: Introduction to IR; The Search Process (MAH) Download
Readings: MIR Ch. 1, 10.1 - 10.3
Optional reading: Data Powers of Ten A Question of Scale The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet

Thurs Sep 07
Lecture: Boolean Queries; Text Processing (tokenization, morphological analysis) (RRL)
View in Browser Download
Readings: MIR Ch. 4.1 - 4.3
Assignment 2: Lexis-Nexis search. Due Sept 14


Week 3:

Tues Sep 12
Lecture: Statistical Properties of Text (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Jakob Nielsen on Zipf distributions

Thurs Sep 14
Lecture: Vector Representation; Term Weights (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Jurafsky & Martin chapter (second half on IR)


Week 4:

Tues Sep 19
Lecture: Vector Space Ranking, Probabilistic Ranking (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: MIR Ch. 2.1-2.5
Assignment 3: Zipf Assignment. Due Sept 26

Thurs Sep 21
Lecture: Ranking continued; Proximity Constraints (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Hearst paper on query constraints, Cooper paper on Boolean search
Assignment 4: Ranking Assigment (PDF) (PostScript) (latex). Due Oct. 3


Week 5:

Tues Sep 26
Lecture: Web Search -- Issues and Algorithms (MAH) Download
Readings: Larson et al. Cheshire paper, Brin & Page Web architecture paper.
Optional additional reading: searchenginewatch.com stats, searchtools.com for information on site search

Thurs Sep 28
Lecture: Web Search -- Architecture and Crawling (MAH) Download
Readings: MIR Ch. 8.1 - 8.2, Heydon & Najork paper on web crawling (sections 1-3.2, 5-6 only).
Optional additional reading: Talks from the 2000 infonortics search engine meeting (unfortunately requires IE to view), web crawler information


Week 6:

Tues Oct 03
Lecture: Evaluation (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: MIR Ch. 3, Blair & Maron paper

Thurs Oct 05
Lecture: Interfaces for Relevance Feedback (MAH) Download
Readings: Koenemann & Belkin paper
Readings: Guides paper, Proceedings of CHI 1991
Assignment 5: Evaluation Assignment. Due Oct 12.


Week 7:

Tues Oct 10
Lecture: Interfaces for Search Starting Points, Overviews (MAH) Download
Readings: Bates berry-picking paper
Readings: MIR Ch. 10.3-10.4

Thurs Oct 12
Lecture: Interfaces for Query Specification, Context (MAH) Download
Readings: MIR Ch. 10.5-10.8
Readings: O'Day & Jeffries paper, Russell et al. paper
Evaluation Assignment Due.


Week 8:

Tues Oct 17
Lecture: Supporting the Search Process Download
Lecture: Midterm Review (MAH) Download
Assignments: Midterm Study Guide

Thurs Oct 19
Guest Lecture: Ronny Kohavi, E-commerce Web Architectures. Download
Midterm Assigned


Week 9:

Tues Oct 24
Lecture: Metadata / Markup (RRL)
View in Browser Download
Midterm Due
Readings: OI Ch. 2-3

Thurs Oct 26
Lecture: Metadata / Markup (RRL)
View in Browser Download
Readings: OI Ch. 4-5, Bates on metadata


Week 10:

Tues Oct 31
Lecture: Lexical Relations, WordNet (MAH) Download
Readings: Fellbaum and Miller WordNet chapters

Thurs Nov 02
Lecture: Cognitive Aspects of Categories & Classification (MAH) Download
Readings: OI Ch. 8, Holland et al. chapter, Bates '88 paper


Week 11:

Tues Nov 07
Lecture: Controlled Vocabulary (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: OI Ch. 6-7, Svenonius paper, Borgman paper

Thurs Nov 09
Lecture: Indexing Languages; SGML; XML (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Soergel paper, Pitts-Moultis & Kirk XML paper
Assignment 6: Metadata, due Nov 21
Solutions to Assignment 6


Week 12:

Tues Nov 14
Lecture: Information Design Process (MAH) (old version here; new version is lost) (pdf of the old version, curtesy of Jon Wu)
Readings: Berlin et al. paper, Newman & Landay paper

Thurs Nov 16
Lecture: Designing Information Architecture with Informal Interface Tools (MAH)
Download
Readings: Sano chapter
Jakob Nielsen on using card-sorting techniques
Assignment 7: Information architecture design assignment, due Dec 05


Week 13:

Tues Nov 21
Lecture: Thesaurus Design and Construction (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Soergel chapter
Assignments: Assignment 6 due

Thurs Nov 23 -- Thanksgiving, no class.


Week 14:

Tues Nov 28
Lecture: Database Design (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Teorey & McFadden (Handouts)
Assignment 8: Database design assignment (not graded)

Thurs Nov 30
Lecture: Database Design (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Teorey & McFadden (Handouts)


Week 15:

Tues Dec 05
Lecture: Database Design - Normalization and SQL (RRL)
Lecture Slides (www) Download
Readings: Teorey & McFadden & Riccardi (Handouts)
Final Exam Study Guide
Assignments: Assignment 7 due

Thurs Dec 07
Lecture: Final Review (MAH) Download




FINAL EXAM: Monday Dec 11, 9:30am-12:30pm