BIRLA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY AND SCIENCE, PILANI

INSTRUCTION DIVISION
First Semester 2014-2015
COURSE HANDOUT (PART II)
In addition to Part-I (general handout for all courses appended to this time table) this portion gives further
details pertaining to the course.
Course No.: CS F469
Course Title: Information Retrieval
Instructor-in-charge: POONAM GOYAL (poonam@pilani.bits-pilani.ac.in)
1. Objective and Scope
This course studies the theory, design, and implementation of text-based information systems. The
Information Retrieval core components of the course include statistical characteristics of text,
representation of information needs and documents, several important retrieval models (Boolean, vector
space, probabilistic, inference net, language modeling, link analysis), clustering algorithms, collaborative
filtering, automatic text categorization, and experimental evaluation. The software architecture
components include design and implementation of high-capacity text retrieval and text filtering systems.
The course is designed to provide students with a broad understanding in the design and use of
information retrieval techniques. The course also aims at providing a holistic view of information retrieval.
2. Text Book
 T1. C. D. Manning, P. Raghavan and H. Schutze. Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge
University Press, 2008. http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/
 T2 Ricci, F.; Rokach, L.; Shapira, B.; Kantor, P.B. (Eds.), Recommender Systems Handbook. 1st Edition.,
2011, 845 p. 20 illus., Hardcover, ISBN: 978-0-387-85819-7
3. Reference Books
 R1: Modern Information Retrieval, Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto, Addison-Wesley,
2000. http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~hearst/irbook/
 R2: Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice by Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor
Strohman, Addison-Wesley, 2009.
 R3: Cross-Language Information Retrieval by By Jian-Yun Nie Morgan & Claypool Publisher series 2010
 R4: Multimedia Information Retrieval by Stefan M. Rüger Morgan & Claypool Publisher series 2010.
 R5 Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines by S. Buttcher, C. Clarke and G.
Cormack, MIT Press, 2010.
 R6: Web Data Mining: Exploring Hyperlinks, Contents, and Usage Data by B. Liu, Springer, Second
Edition, 2011.
4. Course Plan
4a. Modules and Learning Objectives
Module Title Learning Objective(s)
Basic information retrieval To understand what Information retrieval is and how to
M1
concepts represent data in Boolean form and index the data.

Text and vector space To understand Scoring, Term Weighting, the Vector Space
M2
classification Model and scoring in the complete search system.

To understand components of a recommender system,

M3 Recommender systems types of recommender systems and evaluation measures
in recommender systems.
 Web search and link To understand architecture of search engines, crawlers
M4
analysis and the web graph.

4b. Lecture Schedule

Sl No Topic Learning Objective Lecture # Module Reading
1. Course overview Introduction to the course 1 M1 T2 Ch1
The term vocabulary 2,3 M1 T1 Ch 1 &
postings lists 2,R1 Ch2
2. Boolean retrieval
Introduction to ad-hoc 4 Scetion 5
search
Wildcard queries 5 M1 T1 Ch 3
Dictionaries and Spelling correction
3.
tolerant retrieval Edit distances 6
Phonetic correction
Blocked sort-based 7 M1 T1 Ch 4
indexing
Index construction Single-pass in-memory 8
4. indexing
and Compression
Distributed indexing 9
Dynamic indexing
Parametric and zone 10
indexes
Weighted zone scoring
Scoring, term
5. Learning weights 11 M2 T1 Ch 6
weighting
Term frequency and
weighting
Tf-idf weighting
Dot products, 12
Queries as vectors,
The vector space
6. Variant tf-idf functions, M2 T1 Ch 6
model for scoring
Document and query 13
weighting schemes
European Languages 14
Language
7. East Asian Languages M2 R3 Ch 1
Problems in IR
Other Languages
Translation Approaches 15
for CLIR
Cross Language Handling many Languages 16
8. Information Using manually 17 M2 R3 Ch2
Retreival(CLIR) constructed Translation
systems and resources for
CLIR
Basic Multimedia search 18
Multimedia
technologies
9. Information M2 R4 Ch2,3
Content based retreival 19,20
retrieval(MIR)
Multimedia IR Research 21,22
 Recommender Introduction to
23
systems recommendation system
Collaborative
24
recommendation
Content based T2
10. 25 M3
recommendation Ch1,2,3,4,5
Knowledge based
26
recommendation
Hybrid recommendation
27
systems
Web search basics Search Engine
28,29
Architecture
Web characteristics 30
T1 Ch 19
Advertising as the
11. 31 M4 R1 Ch13,
economic model
R2 Ch2
The search user
32
experience
Index size and estimation 33
Web crawlers and Crawling 34
T1 Ch 20
12. indexes Crawler architecture 35,36 M4
R2 Ch 3
Distributing indexes 37
Link Analysis The Web as a graph, 38
Google’s Pagerank 39
13. M4 T1 Ch 21
Hub and authorities (HITS) 40
Web spam, SEO 41
Total number of classes Planned 41

5. Evaluation Schedule
Component Duration Weightage(%) Date & Time Venue Remarks
Mid Sem Exam 90 Mins. 30 8/10 2:00 - Closed Book
3:30 PM
Labs/Assignments 30 To be
announced
Comprehensive 3 Hours 40 4/12 FN Partly open
6. Assignments
Assignment(s) (programming/reading) will be given to the students. This will immensely help the
students in gaining a better understanding of the subject.
7. Chamber Consultation Hours
To be announced in the class.
8. Make-up Policy
Prior Permission is must and Make-up shall be granted only in genuine cases based on individual’s need
and circumstances.
8. Notices
All the notices concerning this course will be displayed on the CSIS notice board or course website.
Instructor-in-charge