SIMS 240 Schedule


This is a preliminary outline for the course. It can be expected to change during the semester.

Week. Content (dates) -- readings


  1. Introduction to Course & IR history (Jan 17,19) -- Readings: Ch. 1 in Grossman & Frieder & Papers by Joyce and Needham; Luhn; Doyle in Readings
    Slides from Lecture 1
    Slides from Lecture 2
  2. Key Concepts in IR (Jan 24, 26) -- Readings: Ch. 1 & Maron and Kuhns; Cleverdon; Salton and Lesk; Hutchins; Saracevic in Readings
    Slides from Lecture 3
    Slides from Lecture 4
  3. IR Models: Boolean and Extensions (Jan 31, Feb 2) -- Readings: Ch. 2.5,2.9 - McCune, Tong & Dean "RUBRIC..."
    Slides from Lecture 5
    Slides from Lecture 6
  4. IR Models: Vector Space (Feb 7, 9) -- Readings: Ch. 2.1 - Salton, Wong & Yang "A Vector Space Model..." & Salton & Buckley "Term-Weighting Approaches..." & Salton & McGill "SMART and SIRE..."; Handouts: Salton (Science); Singhal, Buckley & Mitra (Pivoted); Raghavan & Wong
    Slides from Lecture 7
    Slides from Lecture 8
  5. IR Models: Probabilistic Models and Inference Nets (Feb 14, 16) -- Readings: Ch. 2.2,2.4 - Robertson "The Probability Ranking Principle in IR"; Belkin, et al. "ASK for IR"; Croft & Harper "Using Probabilistic..."; Robertson & Walker "Some Simple Effective Approximations..."; Turtle & Croft "Inference Networks"; Handout - Cooper, Gey, Dabney "Staged Logistic Regression"
    Slides from Lecture 9
    Slides from Lecture 10
    Mini-TREC database and previous queries made available (Feb 16)
  6. Language Models and Intro. to Evaluation (Feb 21, 23 ) -- Readings: Ch. 2.3,3.5 & - Stralkowski "Robust Text Processing..."; Handouts: Ponte & Croft ; Lavrenko & Croft; Hiemstra, Robertson & Zaragoza
    Slides from Lecture 11   Slides on Cheshire
    Slides from Lecture 12
  7. IR Evaluation and Measures (Feb 28, Mar 2) -- Readings: Ch. 4 in Readings in IR
    Slides from Lecture 13
    Slides from Lecture 14
    Mini-TREC group reports on system setup
  8. Evaluation -- Continued & Filtering and Routing (Mar 7, 9) -- Readings: Ch. 5 & Salton and Buckley "...Relevance Feedback...", Griffiths, Luckhurst and Willett "Using Interdocument Similarity...".
    Mini-TREC New queries for testing will be made available.
    Slides from Lecture 15
    Slides from Lecture 16
  9. IR Components (Mar 14, 16) -- Readings: Ch. 3 -
    Slides from Lecture 17
    Slides from Lecture 18
  10. LSI & Clustering (Mar 21, 23) -- Readings: 2.6
    Slides from Lecture 19
    Slides from Lecture 20
  11. Spring Break -- No Class (Mar 28, 30) -- Readings: Ch. ?
  12. Digital Libraries & Geographic IR (Apr 4, 6) -- Readings: Ch. 8
    Slides from Lecture 21
    Additional Slides from Lecture 21 (ASIS 1999)
    Slides from Lecture 22
  13. GIR & IR Components Continued (Apr 11, 13) -- Readings: Ch. 5, Ch. 6
    Slides from Lecture 23
    Slides from Lecture 24
  14. Web IR & NLP for IR -- (Apr 18, 20) -- Readings: Ch. 8, Ch. 3.8 Google Description
    Mini-TREC results of runs due Thursday!
    Slides from Lecture 25
    Slides from Lecture 26
  15. NLP & Cross-language IR (Apr 25, 27) -- Readings: Ch. 4
    Mini-TREC Results and system rankings returned Tuesday
    Slides from Lecture 27
    Slides from Lecture 28
  16. TBA (May 2, 4) -- Readings: Ch. 8
  17. MiniTREC Group reports & Wrapup (May 9) -- Readings: Ch. ?
    Mini-TREC: Group reports (Thursday)