1. Information Retrieval - Organization of the course Jian-Yun Nie 聂建云

2. Goals of this course Learn how IR systems and search engines work – Main aspects of IR – Main approaches Develop research skills – Critical reading – Creative thinking – Rigorous testing and analysis – Communication skills -Discussions -IR experiments -Paper reading -Reports

3. schedule WeekTopicsAssignments 1 (21/2)Introduction 2 (28/2)Indexing process 3 (7/3)Traditional models Boolean, Vector space, Probabilistic, … 4 (14/3)Language modelsExploring an existing system (30%) (5) (21/3)System Evaluation (6) (28/3)Efficient implementation (MapReduce)

4. WeekTopicsAssignments 7 (4/4)Integrating term relations Query expansion, query suggestion, … 8 (11/4)Integrating term dependencies 9 (18/4)Visit to MSRA 10 (25/4)LSA/LDA, paper writingSurvey/extension to existing methods (30%) (11) (2/5)Classification/clustering (12) (9/5)Learning to rank 13 (16/5)CLIR 14 (23/5)Chinese IR 15 (30/5)Student presentations 16 (6/6)Student presentations Final exam (40%) schedule (cont’d)

5. references Some books – W.Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, Trevor Strohman. 2009. Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice, Pearson Education – Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich, 2008.Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. – Several books in book series (to be distributed) Journals – ACM-TOIS – Information Processing and Management – Information Retrieval Journal – JASIST Research papers – To be distributed

6. Contact Email: nie@iro.umontreal.canie@iro.umontreal.ca Office: 1247, computer science building Help from Peng Bo