UC Berkeley School of Information

I 240: Information Retrieval

Outline and Schedule

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

(Week. Content -- dates -- readings)

  1. Introduction to Course & IR history -- (Jan 23) -- Readings: Preface in Manning Papers by Joyce and Needham (PDF); Luhn (PDF); Doyle (PDF)in Readings. Extra reading: The World Brain by H.G. Wells

  2. Key Concepts in IR -- (Jan 28, 30) -- Readings: Chapter 2, 3, 4 in Manning; Maron and Kuhns (PDF); Cleverdon (PDF); Salton and Lesk (PDF); Hutchins (PDF); Saracevic (PDF) in Readings from Lecture 3

  3. IR Models: Boolean and Extensions && Vector Space -- (Feb 4, 6) -- Readings: Ch. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 in Manning; - McCune, Tong & Dean "RUBRIC..." (PDF)

  4. IR Models: Vector Space Cont. & Probabilistic -- (Feb 11, 13) -- Readings: Ch. 6, 7 in Manning; - Salton, Wong & Yang "A Vector Space Model..." (PDF); Salton & Buckley "Term-Weighting Approaches..." (PDF); Salton & McGill "SMART and SIRE..." (PDF); Additional Readings: Salton (Science) (PDF); Singhal, Buckley & Mitra (Pivoted) (PDF); Raghavan & Wong (PDF)

    • Slides from Lecture 6 download
    • Mini-TREC database and previous queries made available (Feb 11)
    • Download trec_eval source download gzip tar file
    • Slides from Lecture 7 - Fred Gey - Probabilistic models download
  5. IR Models: Probabilistic Models -- (Feb 18, 20) -- Readings: Ch. 11 in Manning; - Robertson "The Probability Ranking Principle in IR"(PDF); Belkin, et al. "ASK for IR"(PDF); Croft & Harper "Using Probabilistic..." (PDF); Turtle & Croft "Inference Networks" (PDF); Cooper, Gey, Dabney "Staged Logistic Regression" (PDF); Ponte & Croft ;Lavrenko & Croft; Hiemstra, Robertson & Zaragoza

  6. Probabilistic Cont. : Introduction to Evaluation -- (Feb 25, 27) --

  7. Evaluation and Measures -- (Mar 4, 6) -- Readings: Ch. 8 in Manning; Blair and Maron "An Evaluation of Retrieval Effectiveness for a Full-Text Document-Retrieval System" (PDF); Armstrong, Moffat, Webber and Zobel "Improvements that don't add up: Ad-Hoc Retrieval Results Since 1998" (PDF);

    • Monday: Mini-TREC group reports on system setup*
    • Slides from Lecture 11 download
    • Wed.: Mini-TREC new queries for evaluation*
    • Slides from Lecture 12 download
  8. IR Components Introduction: Relevance Feedback and LSI -- (Mar 11, 13) -- Readings: Ch. 8 in Manning & Salton and Buckley "...Relevance Feedback...", Griffiths, Luckhurst and Willett "Using Interdocument Similarity...".

  9. Web and Graph Search -- (Mar 18, 20) -- Readings: Ch. 16 and 17 in Manning;

    • Slides from Lecture 15 download
    • Wed.: Mike Curtiss of Facebook on Social Graph Searching *
  10. Spring Break: No Class -- (Mar 25, 27) -- Readings: Ch. ?

  11. NLP and Geographic IR -- (Apr 1, 3) -- Readings: Ch. 18 in Manning; David Ferucci, et al. "Building Watson: An overview of the DeepQA Project" (PDF); John Markoff "A Fight to Win the Future: Computers vs. Humans (NYT)" (PDF).

  12. Geographic IR & Web IR -- -- (Apr 8, 10) -- Readings: Ch. 19, 20, 21 in Manning; Google Description

  13. TBA -- (Apr 15, 17) --

  14. MapReduce & Web IR -- (Apr 22, 24) -- Readings: Ch. 18 in Manning;

    • Special Guest Lecture Apr. 15 - Benjamin Goldenberg - Yelp
    • Slides from Lecture 21 download

    Mini-TREC results of runs due Monday! Mini-TREC Results and system rankings returned Wednesday.

  15. Mini-TREC reports and Wrapup -- (Apr 29, May 1) -- Readings: Ch. 15 in Manning;

    Mini-TREC: Group reports Apr 29th

  16. RRR WEEK -- (May 6, 8) -- Readings: No Class Meetings in RRR Week -- work on your paper

  17. Final papers due -- (May 13) -- Readings: Ch. ?