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 31

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

Thursday, September 2    (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 7

Lecture: Lecture: Introduction to IR; The Search Process (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 1, Footprints in the Snow (Munro, Hook and Benyon), Berry-Picking (Bates), Where did you Put It? (Berlin et. Al.)


Thursday, September 9

Lecture: Boolean Queries; Text Processing (tokenization, morphological analysis) (RRL)
Readings: MIR Ch. 2 & Ch. 4, How to Use Controlled Vocabularies More Effectively in Online Searching (Bates), Improving Full-Text Precision on Short Queries using Simple Constraints (Hearst)

Tuesday, September 14

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



Thursday, September 16

Lecture: Implementing Web Site Search Engines
Readings: MIR Ch. 13

Tuesday, September 21

Lecture: Statistical Properties of Text and Vector Representation
Readings: Developments in Automatic Text Retrieval (Salton), Getting Beyond Boole (Cooper), Using Latent Semantic Analysis to Improve Access to Textual Information (Dumais et. Al.)

Assignment 2

Thursday, September 23

Lecture: Probabilistic Ranking and Relevance Feedback
Readings: Cheshire II: Designing a Next-Generation Online Catalog (Larson)

Week 5

Tuesday, September 28  (assignment 2 is due)

Lecture: Evaluation
Readings: MIR Ch. 3, An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-text Document-Retrieval System (Blair and Maron), Rave Reviews: Acquiring Relevance Assessments from Multiple Users (Belew), A Case for Interaction: A Study of Interactive Information Retrieval Behavior and Effectiveness (Koenemann and Belkin), Work Tasks and Socio-Cognitive Relevence: A Specific Example(Hjorland and Chritensen), Social Information Filtering: Algorithms for Automating "Word of Mouth"(Shardanand and Maes)

Assignment 3

Solutions to Assignment 3

Wednesday, September 29

Lecture: Math Tutorial

Thursday, September 30

Lecture: Evaluation of IR Systems
In-class Exercise: Evaluation Lab
Readings: MIR Ch. 10

Week 6

Tuesday, October 5(assignment 3 is due)

 Lecture: Database Design
Readings: Logical Database Design and the Relational Model(McFadden & Hoffer)

Assignment 4


Thursday, October 7

Lecture: Database Design
Readings: The Entity-Relationship Model

Week 7

Tuesday, October 12

Lecture: Midterm Review
Readings: Midterm Exam Preparation Guide

Thursday, October 14

Midterm

Week 8

Tuesday, October 19

Lecture: Categorization
Readings: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Lakoff)




Thursday, October 21

Lecture:Knowledge Representation
Readings: The Vocabulary Problem (Furnas); CYC: A Large Scale Investment in Knowledge Infrastructure (Lenat); Commonsense-Based Interfaces (Minsky)

Week 9

Tuesday, October 26

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


Thursday, October 28

Lecture: Controlled Vocabularies Introduction
Readings: Textbook: Organization of Information Chapters 6-7 (Taylor); Unaswered Questions in the Design of Controlled Vocabularies (Svenonius) ; Subject Access in Online Catalogs (Bates); Why Are Online Catalogs Sill Hard to Use? (Borgman)

Week 10

Tuesday, November 2

Lecture: Project Introduction
Readings: Defining Information Architecture (Rosenfeld)
Assignment 5: Cameraphone Use Scenario

Thursday, November 4

Lecture: Semantic Web and RDF
Reading: "The Semantic Web" in Scientific American (Berners-Lee, Hendler, Lassila); Link: RDF Primer (Minola and Miller)

Week 11

Tuesday, November 9

Lecture: Facetted Classification and Thesaurus Design and Construction
Readings: Handout: Facetted Classification as a Basis for Knowledge Organization in a Digital Environment: the Bliss Bibliographic Classification as a Model for Vocabulary Management and the Creation of Multidimensional Knowledge Structures (Broughton); Link: Jakob Nielsen on using card-sorting techniques (Nielsen); Chapter F: Flow of Work in the Construction of Indexing Languages and Thesauri (Soergel); Facetted Metadata for Image Search and Browsing (Yee, Swearington, Li, Hearst); Facetted Classification (Gower); Facetted Classification: Input to the Systems (Vickery)
Assignment 6:Phone Metadata Design (Due Nov. 18)



Thursday, November 11

Lecture: Veterans Day - NO CLASS

Week 12

Tuesday, November 16

Lecture: Metadata Standards
Readings: Textbook: Organization of Information Chapters 3-5 (Taylor)




Thursday, November 18

Lecture: Multimedia Information Organization and Retrieval
Readings: Computational Media Aesthetics: Finding Meaning Beautiful (Dorai and Venkatesh); The Holy Grail of Content-Based Media Analysis (Chang); Editing Out Video Editing (Davis)
Assignment 7: Photo Metadata Revision (Due Dec. 2)

Week 13

Tuesday, November 23

Lecture: Metadata for Motion Pictures: Media Streams and MPEG-7
Readings: Media Streams: An Iconic Visual Language for Video Representation (Davis); MPEG-7 (Part 1) (Martinez, Koenen, Pereira); MPEG-7 (Part 2) (Martinez, Koenen, Pereira)





Thursday, November 25

Lecture: NO CLASS - HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Week 14

Tuesday, November 30

Lecture: Mobile and Context-Aware Mutlimedia Information Systems
Readings: Understanding and Using Context (Dey); Time as essence for photo browsing through personal digital libraries (Graham, Garcia-Molina, Paepcke, Winograd); Automatic Organization for Digital Photographs with Geographic Coordinates (Naaman); From Context to Content: Leveraging Context to Infer Media Metadata (Davis)





Thursday, December 2

Lecture: Looking Backward Looking Forward: Future of Information Systems
Readings: Emanuel Goldberg, electronic document retrieval, and Vannevar Bush's Memex (Buckland); As We May Think (Bush); Memex II (Bush); Memex Revisited (Bush)
Assignment 8: Photo Capture and Annotation (Due Dec. 9)
Assignment 9: Phone Project Presentation (Due Dec. 7)

Week 15

Tuesday, December 7 

Lecture: Project Presentations

Thursday, December 9

Lecture: Final Review
Readings: Final Exam Study Guide
Due: Extra Credit Assignment

FINAL EXAM

Tuesday, December 14, 9:30 AM -12:30 PM