Entropy in Information Theory (of Claude Shannon) and Coding Theory

ntroduction -What is Information Retrieval
    (Jan. 5)

• Introduction
• Users and user's information needs
• Data, information and documents
• Past, present and future of IR
• Reading: Chapter 1.
• Reading:
• Short History of Information Retrieval and Libraries
• Rao, Ramana (2004) From IR to Search and Beyond. ACM Queue, 67-73.
• Lecture Notes
• Assignment 1: Review of Search Engines (assigned, due in two weeks)

Week 2. Models of Information Retrieval
   (Jan. 12)

• Inverted indexing
• Boolean logic
• Vector model
• Alternative models
• Models for browsing
• Reading: Chapter 2.
• Reference: Basic unix commands
• Lecture Notes
• Inverted Indexing Exercise

Week 3.  Retrieval Evaluation
   (Jan. 19)

• Relevance
• Recall & Precision
• Similarity measure
• Evaluation of IR systems
• IR retrieval experiments
• Reading: Chapter 3.
• Assignment 2:  Indexing Exercises
• Reference: English letter Statistics
• Reference: Word rankings in "Alice in Wonderland"
• Lecture Notes

Week 4. Query Languages and Query Operations
   (Jan. 26)

• Basic queries
• Structural queris
• Query expansion
• Reading: Chapter 4 & 5 (except 5.3 & 5.4)
• Lecture Notes

Week 5. Text Retrieval and Languages
   (Feb. 2)

• Word extraction
• Stop words
• stemming
• Word frequency counts
• Zipf's Law
• Reading:  Chapter 6 & 7
• Reading: A Mathematical Theory of Communication (Shannon’s original paper)
• Assignment 3
• Lecture Notes

Week 6. Indexing and Searching
  (Feb 9)

• Inverted indexing
• Subject indexing and metadata
• Citation indexing
• Term associations & co-occurrences
• Midterm 
• Reading: Chapter 8
• Lecture Notes

Week 7. Effectiveness Improvement Techniques
 (Feb. 16)

• Overview of some practical IR systems
• Statistical ranking
• User profiles
• Relevance feedback
• Reading:
• Lecture Notes

Week 8. User Interfaces and Visualization
 (Feb. 23)

• Browsing
• Interactive interfaces
• Retrieval experiments
• Lecture Notes (Knowledge Representation)
• Lecture Notes (Visualization)
• Reading: Chapter 10

Week 9.  IR Research and Future of IR Systems
 (March 2)

• Next generation of web search engines
• XML search engines
• Digital Libraries
• Reading: Chapter 13 & 15
• What do people want from information retrieval
• The seven ages of information retrieval
• Readings on future search engines
• Lecture Notes

Week 10. Final Project Presentation 

(March  9)

• Sample text collections
• Search engine review links
• SIGIR93.txt