Welcome to Information Retrieval (IR) course! It is difficult to imagine living without search engines. Availability of big data has necessitated a systematic study of retrieval techniques. Principles and practices of information retrieval have been a focus of both researchers and practitioners alike. This course is not about just search engines. It is about dealing with big data and retrieving information which opens up several interesting applications. This course will introduce students to key parts of IR such as indexing techniques, challenges in query processing and well-known retrieval models.


At the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Understand and apply text indexing techniques to big data.
• Understand and apply text ranking techniques.
• Analyze and evaluate existing retrieval systems.

Lecture #	Topic	Readings	Slides/Material
1	Introduction to Boolean Retrieval	Chapter 1 from CPS	Lecture1
2	Overview of Indexing, Query Processing and Evaluation	Chapter 2 from CPS	Lecture2
3	Storing Dictionaries and Tolerant Retrieval	Chapter 3 from CPS	Lecture3
4	String Handling and Spelling Correction	Chapter 3 from CPS	Lecture4 Phonetic Correction [By Vinoothna]
5	Index Construction	Chapter 4 from CPS	Lecture5
6	Building Search Engines with Solr	Solr Website	Lecture6-Solr [By Suchitra]
7	Dynamic and Distributed Indexing Lucene Demo	Chapter 4 from CPS	Lecture7 Lucene Demo
8	Index Compression	Chapter 5 from CPS	Lecture8
9	Vector Space Model	Chapter 6,7 from CPS	Lecture9
10	IR Evaluation	Chapter 8 of CPS	Lecture10 Zonal Indexing
11	Probabilistic Retrieval	Chapter 11 of CPS	Lecture11
12	Language Models, Web Basics, Web Crawling, Link Analysis	Chapter 12,19,20,21 of CPS	Langauge Models Lecture12

Instrument Max Marks Final Exam 60% Assignments (3 * 10% each) 30% In-Class Quiz (5 * 2%) 10%

Familiarity with Java will help in coding with Lucene. You may use your favourite programming language (for assignments) as long as the objectives of the assignment are met. Basic understanding of linear algebra, set theory and probability will be useful in understanding the IR models.


Text

• [CPS] An Introduction to Information Retrieval. Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, Hinrich Schütze.

Reference

• [BDT] Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice. Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, Trevor Strohman