Please note that Professor Marti Hearst is an author or co-author of many of the lectures and assignments that will be given this term.

Readings refer to Modern Information Retrieval (MIR) or The Organization of Information (OI), or to papers in the reader. Readings are meant to be read in advance of the lecture for which they are shown.

This schedule is subject to change. 


Go directly to the current week....

Week 1

Tuesday, August 26

Lecture: Course Overview (RRL)
Reading: Borges, Dennett, and Reddy (handouts)
Assignment 1: The Student Questionnaire and your answer to the question, What is Information? (due Aug 29)

Thursday, August 28    (assignment 1 is due)

Lecture: What is Information? History of Information Search and Organization (MED & RRL)
Reading: OI: Chapters 1 & 2
Optional reading: Data Powers of Ten  A Question of Scale  The Size and Growth Rate of the Internet

Tuesday, September 2

Lecture: Categorization (MED)
Readings: George Lakoff's Women, Fire and Dangerous Things, pp. xi - 57.


Thursday, September 4

Lecture: Knowledge Representation (MED)
Readings:  The Vocabulary Problem in Human-System Communication (G. W. Furnas, T. K. Landauer, L. M. Gomez, S. T. Dumais);  Commonsense-Based Interfaces (M. Minsky);  CYC: A Large-Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure (D. B. Lenat)
Optional reading:  A Framework for Representing Knowledge (M. Minsky);  CYC: Toward Programs with Common Sense (D. B. Lenat, R. V. Guha, K. Pittman, D. Pratt, M. Shepherd)
Assignment 2: Photo Use Scenario- Application Idea (due Sept 16)

Tuesday, September 9

Lecture: Lexical Relations and WordNet (RRL)
Readings:  Word Association Norms, Mutual Information, and Lexicography (Church, Kenneth and Hanks, Patrick); Wordnet: An Electronic Lexical Database -- Introduction & Ch. 1 (C. Fellbaum, G.A. Miller) (handout)


Thursday, September 11

Lecture: Metadata Intro (RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 3 & 5

Tuesday, September 16 (assignment 2 is due)

Lecture: Controlled Vocabularies Introduction (RRL)
Readings: OI Ch. 6 & 7; Unanswered Questions in the Design of Controlled Vocabularies (E. Svenonius); Why Are Online Catalogs Still Hard to Use? (C. L. Borgman); Subject Access in Online Catalogs: A Design Model (M. J. Bates)

Thursday, September 18

Lecture: Thesaurus Design and Construction (RRL)
Readings: Chapter F: Flow of Work in the Construction of Indexing Languages and Thesauri (Soergel); The House of Quality (Hauser and Clausing); Designing the Organizational Framework (Sano)
Assignment 3: Photo Capture and Annotation (due Sept 23)

Thesaurus Examples Shown in Class: ERIC, the Educational Resources Information Center (view 1, view 2, view 3, view 4, view 5); MeSH, Medical Subject Headings (view 1, view 2, view 3, view 4); AAT, Art & Architecture Thesaurus (view 1, view 2)

Tuesday, September 23

Lecture: Multimedia Information Organization and Retrieval (MED)
Readings: Editing Out Video Editing (M. Davis);  Computational Media Aesthetics: Finding Meaning Beautiful (C. Dorai, S. Venkatesh);  The Holy Grail of Content-Based Media Analysis (S. Chang);  Applications of Video-Content Analysis and Retrieval (N. Dimitrova, H. Zhang, B. Shahraray, I. Sezan, T. Huang, A. Zakhor)
Optional reading:  Defining Multimedia (H. Purchase);  Video Handling with Music and Speech Detection (K. Minami, A. Akutsu, H. Hamada, Y. Tonomura); An Overview of Audio Information Retrieval (J. Foote);  FotoFile: A Consumer Multimedia Organization and Retrieval System (A. Kuchinsky, C. Pering, M. L. Creech, D. Freeze, B. Serra, J. Gwizdka)



Thursday, September 25 (assignment 3 is due)

Lecture: Metadata for Motion Pictures: Media Streams (MED)
Readings:  Media Streams: An Iconic Visual Language for Video Representation (M. Davis)
Optional reading:  IDIC: Assembling Video Sequences from Story Plans and Content Annotations (M. Davis, W. Sack);  Media Streams: Representing Video for Retrieval and Repurposing (M. Davis);  Garage Cinema and the Future of Media Technology (M. Davis)
Assignment 4.1: Phone Metadata Design - Part 1 (due Oct 2)

Tuesday, September 30

Lecture: Database Design (RRL)
Readings: Handouts in Class - Database Modeling and Design -- Ch. 2 The ER Model - Basic Concepts (Teorey, T.J.); Logical Database Design and the Relational Model (F. R. McFadden, J. A. Hoffer)


Thursday, October 2 (assignment 4 - Part 1 is due)

Lecture: Database Design - Normalization and SQL - Photo Project Example (RRL)
Assignment 4.2: Metadata Revision - Part 2 (due Oct 9)

Tuesday, October 7

Lecture: Database Design XML and "Document Engineering (Guest Lecturer: Bob Glushko)
Readings: From A Technical Introduction to XML (Norm Walsh, October 13, 1998, xml.com), read specifically: "What is XML", "What do XML Documents Look Like?" [don't stress over this -- read it lightly], and "Validity"; What is XSLT? (Ken Holman, XML.com, August 16, 2000) [read as much of this as you can, but at least through section 1.1.5.1]; XML Standards and Specifications for Interoperable E-commerce (Bob Glushko) [read as much of this as you can, but at least through "Horizontal Content Standards"]
Assignment 5: Project Presentations (due Oct. 21)

Thursday, October 9 (assignment 4 - Part 2 is due)

Lecture: Metadata and Markup (RRL)
Readings: Handout in Class - XML Black Book: Chapter 5 - DTDs in XML (Kirk, Cheryl)

Lecture: Metadata for Motion Pictures: MPEG-7 (MED)
Readings: MPEG-7 (Part 1) (J. M. Martinez, R. Koenen, F. Pereira); MPEG-7 (Part 2) (J. Martinez)
Optional reading:  Everything You Wanted to Know About MPEG-7: Part 1 (F. Nack, A. T. Lindsay);  Everything You Wanted to Know About MPEG-7: Part 2 (F. Nack, A. T. Lindsay);  Multimedia Standards: Building Blocks of the Web (L. Rutledge);  SMIL 2.0 (Part 1) (D. C. A. Bulterman);  SMIL 2.0 (Part 2) (D. C. A. Bulterman)



Thursday, October 16 (assignment 4 - Part 3 is due)

Lecture: Introduction to IR and the Search Process (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 1; Social Navigation of Information in Space (Nmunro, Alan and Hook, Kristinia and Benyon, David); Where did you Put It? Issues in the Design and Use of a Group Memory (Berlin, Lucy et. Al.)
Assignment 4.3: Photo Annotation - Part 3 (due Oct. 21)

Lecture: Project Presentations (assignment 5 on Phone Project Group Websites)
Assignment 6: Metadata Consolidation ( Milestone 1 due Oct 23)


Thursday, October 23 (assignment 6 - Milestone 1 is due)

Lecture: Information Organization Summary and Project Update (MED)

Tuesday, October 28

Lecture: Boolean Queries and Text Processing (RRL)
Readings: Using Latent Semantic Analysis to Improve Access to Textual Information (Dumais, Susan and Furnas, George and Landauer, Thomas)


Thursday, October 30 (assignment 6 - Milestone 2 is due)

Lecture: Statistical Properties of Text and Vector Representation (RRL)
Readings: Getting Beyond Boole (Cooper, W.S.); How to Ues Controlled Vocabularies More Effectively in Online Searching (Bates, M. J. ); Improving Full-Text Precision on Short Queries using Simple Constraints (Hearst, Marti)
Optional reading: MIR Ch. 7
Assignment 7: Ranking (due Nov 18)

Lecture: Implementing Web Site Search Engines (Guest Lecturer: Avi Rappaport)
Readings: MIR Ch. 13



Thursday, November 6

Lecture: In Class Exam

Lecture: No Class - Veterans' Day


Thursday, November 13

Lecture: Probabilistic Ranking and Relevance Feedback (RRL)
Readings: Cheshire II: Designing a Next-Generation Online Catalog (R. Larson, J. McDonough, P. O'Leary, L. Kuntz)

Lecture: Evaluation (RRL) 
Readings: MIR Ch. 3; An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness (Blair & Maron); Rave Reviews: Acquiring Relevance Assessments from Multiple Users (Belew, Richard); A Case for Interaction: A Study of Interactive Information Retrieval Behavior and Effectiveness (Koeneman & Belkin); GroupLens: Applying Collaborative Filtering to Usenet News (Konstan, Joseph et. Al.); Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating "Word of Mouth" (Shardanand, Upendra and Maes, Pattie)
Assignment 8: Lexis Nexis/Dialog Search (due Nov 25)

Thursday, November 20

Lecture: Web Search Architecture and Crawling (RRL)
Readings: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine (Brin, Sergey and Page, Lawrence); Mercator: A Scalable, Extensible Web Crawler (Heydon, Allan and Najork, Marc)

Lecture: Interfaces for Information Retrieval I (MED)
Readings: MIR Ch. 10.1 - 10.3; Why Interfaces Don't Work (Norman, D.A.) (handout); As We May Think (Bush, V.); Memex II (Bush, V.); Memex Revisited (Bush, V.)


Thursday, November 27

No Class -- Happy Thanksgiving!

Lecture: Interfaces for Information Retrieval II (MED)
Readings: MIR Ch. 10.4 - 10.10

Thursday, December 4

Lecture: Final Review (RRL), Wishter Launch - Wishter User Guide
Readings: Final Exam Study Guide

Monday, Dec 8, 9:30am - 12:30pm, South Hall rm 202