CS 371R: Information Retrieval and Web Search

\ CS 371R: Information Retrieval and Web Search

CS 371R:
Information Retrieval and Web Search

Instructor

Raymond J. Mooney, office hours: Tu 11am-12pm, Thu 2-3pm (in person in GDC 3.806 or on Zoom by appointment via email)

Teaching Assistant

Sumaya M Al-Bedaiwi, salbedaiwi@utexas.edu, Office hours: Mon 12:30 PM - 1:30 PM, Wed 3:30 PM - 4:30 PM in the GDC Basement.

Time and Place

Fall, 2024; TuTh 9:30-11:00 AM; GDC 5.302 (in-person, no Zoom option).

General Course Information

Textbook

Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze

Programming Projects

Project 0: Optional Software Test (due 9/11)
Project 1: Vector Space Retrieval (due 9/23)
Project 2: Evaluating Performance of Query Operations (due 10/7)
Project 3: Web Spidering and Link Analysis (due Nov. 4, NOTE: parts 1 and 2 due Oct. 22 and 24 respectively)
Project 4: Deep Learning (due 12/2)

Exams

Midterm: Thu, October 10, (Equation sheet 1) (NDCG Equations)(Link analysis algorithms sheet)
- Previous year's midterm in PDF
Final: Friday, December 13, 10:30 am-12:30 pm, JGB 2.216 (Equation sheet 2) (Equation sheet 3) (Learning algorithms sheet) (Preceptron algorithm sheet)
- Previous year's final in PDF
See /u/mooney/ir-code/solns/ for sample solutions.

PowerPoint Presentations

Introduction (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Boolean and Vector-Space Retrieval Models (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Basic Tokenizing, Indexing, and Implementation of Vector-Space Retrieval (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Performance Evaluation of Information Retrieval Systems (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Query Operations (Relevance Feedback / Query Expansion) (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Text Properties and Languages (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Web Search: Introduction (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Web Search: Spidering (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Web Search: Link Analysis (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Automated Text Categorization and Neural Network Learning (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Automated Text Categorization: IR, kNN, and Naive Bayes (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Language Models (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Language-Model Based Retrieval (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Deep Learning (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Recommender Systems (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Ethical Issues in IR (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)
Clustering, Information Extraction, and Semantic Parsing (PowerPoint) (PDF) (PDF handout)

Servlet Demos

Simple Search Engine

Java Course Code

A jar file for the course Java code is available here.

JavaDoc for Course Code

Related Courses

Miscellaneous Links

Relevant Books Written for the General Public

Weaving the Web: The original design and ultimate destiny of the World Wide Web, by its inventor, Tim Berners-Lee with Mark Fischetti, 1999.
Speeding the Net: The Inside Story of Netscape and How It Challenged Microsoft , Joshua Quittner, Michelle Slatalla, 1998.
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture , John Battelle, 2005.
The Google Story, David Vise and Mark Malseed, 2005.
Planet Google: One Company's Audacious Plan To Organize Everything We Know , Randall Stross, 2008.
In The Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives , Stephen Levy, 2011.
Genius Makers: The Mavericks Who Brought AI to Google, Facebook, and the World, Cade Metz, 2021.
Linked: The New Science of Networks: How Everything is Connected to Everything Else and What it Means for Science, Business and Everyday Life, A.L. Barabasi, 2002. (book on the statistical properties of the Web and other graph structures in nature)
The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More, Chris Anderson, 2006. (book on how Zipfian power laws also describe the range of choices available to consumers on the web)
The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, 2016.
The Ethical Algorithm: The Science of Socially Aware Algorithm Design, Michael Kearns and Aaron Roth, 2019.
An Ugly Truth: Inside Facebook's Battle for Domination, Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, 2021
The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, Tim Wu, 2016, (more on how tech companies manipulate people to make more money).
Who Owns This Sentence?: A History of Copyrights and Wrongs, David Bellos and Alexandre Montagu, 2024.
Burn Book: A Tech Love Story, Kara Swisher, 2024 (a well-known tech journalist's memoir of interacting with leaders in the web industry)

mooney@cs.utexas.edu