251-0341-01L Information Retrieval
News
- To see your exam papers:
- When: Monday, Feb 22, 10:30-12:00, and Thursday, Feb 25, 10:30-12:00
- Where: CAB F 78
- 08/02: Check out your final grade here.
- 08/12: Final exam will be a 60-minute long, open book/note exam.
- 08/12: Course material's page updated.
- 02/12: Specification of the fourth project is uploaded now.
- 02/12: The final exam of this course is scheduled to be held in the last week of the semester (Wednesday, Dec 16)
- 16/11: Last lecture notes added to the page.
- 12/11: Specification of the third project (text categorization) is
available now. Its delivery deadline is set to be November,
25th.
- 29/10: Specification of the second project has been updated. Apart
from description of the second phase, an appendix section on how to
draw the Precision/Recall Graph has been also added. Notice that the
deadline for the second phase is Wednesday, November 11th.
- 16/10: Next week's lecture will be covered by assistants: A
merged session with the tutorial, focusing on topics related to
the second project .
- 15/10: Specification of the second project is available now. The
deadline for the first phase is Wednesday, 28/10.
- 14/10: The second tutorial of the semester will be held next week
(21/10)
- 30/09: Next exercise session (07/10) is reserved for the first
tutorial of the semester (on basics of statistics and machine
learning)
- 30/09: The specification of first project is updated! Please notice
that the deadline is October 14th (in two weeks).
- 24/09: Check the course materials' page for the first project's specification.
- 21/09: The specification of the first project will be announced soon, please form (or join) a group as soon as possible and let the TAs know.
- 08/09: The course website is now active. Happy new
semester!
Course Description
The course presents an introduction to the field of information retrieval and discusses automated techniques to effectively handle and manage unstructured and semi-structured information. This includes methods and principles that are at the heart of various systems for information access, such as Web or enterprise search engines, categorization and recommender systems, as well as information extraction and knowledge management tools.
The plan for exercise classes: there will be 3 or 4 small programming projects which one of them is optional and the rest are mandatory. In other words, in order to pass the course you need to hand in all, except one, of the projects. It's up to you to choose which project to skip. Projects will be done by groups of 2 or 3 students. Please form (or join) a group as soon as possible and let the TAs know. The projects results and artifacts will be discussed face to face in exercise classes. Moreover, some of the exercise sessions are reserved for giving tutorials on the subjects that are not fully covered in lectures (mainly, the necessary mathematical basics). The exact schedule for these tutorials will be announced in advance.
Course Materials
See hereLecturer
Thomas Hofmann (Google)
TAs
- Alexander Vezhnevet
- Kyumars Sheikh Esmaili
Language
English
Syllabus
1. Introduction
2. Vocabulary and dictionaries
3. Indexing (1): Index construction
4. Indexing (2): Index compression
5. Retrieval Models (1): Boolean and vector space
model
6. Retrieval Models (2): Probabilistic Retrieval and
Language Models
7. Evaluation
8. Hypertext & Web Retrieval
9. Document Clustering
10. Text Categorization
11. Recommender Systems & Social Filtering
12. Image and Multimedia Retrieval [optional]
Schedule
- Lecture: Wed 09:00 - 11:00 IFW A 36
- Exercise: Wed 11:00 - 12:00
IFW A 36
Literature
The main textbook of the course is:
- Introduction to Information Retrieval [the electronic copy is freely available]



