AI539: Advanced Information Retrieval – Spring 2024

Course Description

This course covers the foundations and recent advancements of Information Retrieval (IR). The course focues on the design and implementation of text-based information systems such as search engine and recommender systems. We will covers topics including crawling and indexing, query understanding, (large) language models, learning to rank, interactive search, evaluation and user models, question answering, conversational system, and neural models for IR.

Course Information

Lectures

Tuesday & Thursday 4:00-5:20pm at Weniger Hall 275

Instructor

Huazheng Wang
Email: huazheng.wang [at] oregonstate.edu
Office: KEC 3097
Office hours: Tuesday 2-4pm, KEC 3097; Friday 1-2pm, KCE3097/Zoom (by appointment)

Contact

We will use Canvas for posting slides and assignments, and Discord for communication. See Canvas announcements for the link to Discord channel.

Prerequisites

  • Python. We will use Python/Jupyter notebook for programming assignments.

  • Basic knowledge of probability and statistics.

  • Basic understanding of machine learning / deep learning.

Schedule

Week Date Lecture Readings
Week 1 4/2 Introduction to the course, Information retrieval basics [MRS] Ch 1.
4/4 Web crawling, text processing, inverted index [MRS] Ch 2, Ch 20, Ch 4.
Week 2 4/9 Vector space models and probabilistic retrieval models [MRS] Ch 6, Ch 11.
4/11 IR evaluations and metrics [MRS] Ch 8.
Week 3 1/16 Modern IR evaluations [MRS] Ch 8.
1/18 Language models [MRS] Ch 6, Ch 11.
Week 4 4/23 Learning to rank [MRS] Ch 12.
4/25 Relevance feedback, implicit feedback and click model [MRS] Ch 13, Ch 14.
Week 5 4/30 Unbiasedness, fairness and robustness in IR
5/2 Neural IR and distributed representation learning for text
Week 6 5/7 Neural ranking models and Dense retrieval
5/9 Recommender system and Information filtering
Week 7 5/14 Midterm Exam
5/16 Question answering and conversational system
Week 8 5/21 Retrieval-Augmented Generation
5/23 Link analysis
Week 9 5/28 Guest lecturer (tentative)
5/30 Interactive information retrieval and online learning
Week 106/4 Project presentations
6/6 Project presentations

Gradings

  • Homework – (2*15%) 30%

  • Quiz - 5%

  • Midterm - 20%

  • Paper presentation – 10%

  • Final project – 30%

  • Total – 100%

Resources

Readings:
[MRS] Introduction to Information Retrieval. Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schuetze, Cambridge University Press, 2008.