CS499: Introduction to Information Retrieval – Winter 2024

Course Description

This course focuses on the foundations of modern search engine and fundamental and advanced techniques of text-based information systems, including 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 4:00-5:50pm at Weniger Hall 287

Instructor

Huazheng Wang
Email: huazheng.wang [at] oregonstate.edu
Office: KEC 3097
Office hours: Tuesday 2-4pm, KEC 3097; Friday 1-2pm, 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 1/9 Introduction to the course, Information retrieval basics [MRS] Ch 1.
1/11 Web crawling and text processing [MRS] Ch 2, Ch 20.
Week 2 1/16 Inverted index and index construction [MRS] Ch 4.
1/18 IR evaluations and metrics [MRS] Ch 8.
Week 3 1/23 Modern IR evaluations [MRS] Ch 8.
1/25 Vector space models and probabilistic retrieval models [MRS] Ch 6, Ch 11.
Week 4 1/30 Language models [MRS] Ch 12.
2/1 Machine learning basics, text classification and clustering [MRS] Ch 13, Ch 14.
Week 5 2/6 Learning to rank
2/8 Relevance feedback, implicit feedback and click model
Week 6 2/13 Neural networks and neural information retrieval
2/15 Distributed representation learning for text
Week 7 2/20 Neural ranking models
2/22 Midterm Exam
Week 8 2/27 Link analysis
2/29 Question answering
Week 9 3/5 Conversational system
3/7 Interactive information retrieval and online learning
Week 103/12 Project presentations
3/14 Project presentations

Gradings

  • Homework – (3*15%) 45%

  • Quiz - 10%

  • Midterm exam – 25%

  • Final project – 20%

  • Total – 100%

Resources

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