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CS499: Introduction to Information Retrieval – Winter 2025
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 Kidder Hall 356
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 | Homework & Quiz | Readings |
| Week 1 | 1/7 | Introduction to the course, Information retrieval basics | | [MRS] Ch 1. |
| 1/9 | Web crawling and text processing | | [MRS] Ch 2, Ch 20. |
| Week 2 | 1/14 | Inverted index and index construction | | [MRS] Ch 4. |
| 1/16 | IR evaluations and metrics | HW1 released | [MRS] Ch 8. |
| Week 3 | 1/21 | Modern IR evaluations | | [MRS] Ch 8. |
| 1/23 | Vector space models and probabilistic retrieval models | | [MRS] Ch 6, Ch 11. |
| Week 4 | 1/28 | Language models | Quiz 1 | [MRS] Ch 12. |
| 1/30 | Machine learning basics, text classification and clustering | HW1 due, HW2 released | [MRS] Ch 13, Ch 14. |
| Week 5 | 2/4 | Learning to rank | Project prosal due | |
| 2/6 | Relevance feedback, implicit feedback and click model | | |
| Week 6 | 2/11 | Neural networks and neural information retrieval | Quiz 2 | |
| 2/13 | Distributed representation learning for text | HW2 due | |
| Week 7 | 2/18 | Large Language Models | HW3 released | |
| 2/20 | Neural ranking models | | |
| Week 8 | 2/25 | Link analysis | | |
| 2/27 | Midterm Exam | | |
| Week 9 | 3/4 | Question answering and conversational system | HW3 due | |
| 3/6 | Fairness, privacy and robustness in IR | | |
| Week 10 | 3/11 | Project presentations | | |
| 3/13 | Project presentations | |
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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.
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