CS798: Advanced Topics
Information Retrieval
Fall 2007

Instructor:

Charlie Clarke
School of Computer Science
DC2597D
(519) 888-4567 x32184
claclark@plg.uwaterloo.ca
http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~claclark

Grading

• Exercises from the text (10%) - due October 22
• A review paper based on a topic area selected by the student with the agreement of the instructor (30%) - due December 17
• 20-minute in-class presentation (20%)
• Class Project (40%)

Classes

• September 10:
  • Introductory lecture
• September 17:
  • Read: Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Section 3.1
  • An introduction to Wumpus.
• September 24:
  • Read: Section 3.2
  • Charles L. A. Clarke, Eugene Agichtein, Susan Dumais and Ryen W. White. The influence of caption features on clickthrough patterns in Web search. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, August 2007.
• October 1:
  • Read: Section 3.3
  • Stefan Büttcher and Charles L. A. Clarke. A Security Model for Full-Text Search in Multi-User Environments. In 4th USENIX Conference on File and Storage Technologies (USENIX FAST), San Francisco, December 2005.
• October 8:
  • No Class. Happy Thanksgiving!
• October 15:
  • Read: Chapter 9
  • Charles L. A. Clarke. Controlling Overlap in Content-Oriented XML Retrieval. In 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, pages 441-448, Salvador, Brazil, August 2005.
  • Guidelines for the project will be introduced.
• October 22:
  • Read: Chapter 10
  • Gord Cormack will discuss email spam filtering.
• October 29:
  • I'll be talking about Web Search, including the classic papers on pagerank and Google:
    • Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. In Proceedings of the Seventh World Wide Web Conference (WWW7), Brisbane, Australia, April 1998.
    • Lawrence Page, Sergey Brin, Rajeev Motwani and Terry Winograd. The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web. Stanford InfoLab Technical Report 1999-66.
  • Update on the Class Project.
  • Student Presentations:
    • LSA: Adam Fourney
      • Scott Deerwester, Susan Dumais, Goerge Furnas, Thomas Landauer and Richard Harshman. Indexing by latent semantic analysis. Journal of the American Society for Information Science , 41(6), pp. 391-407, 1990.
    • Web Data Mining: Alexandra Laflamme-Sanders, Oct 29
      • Sergey Brin. Extracting Patterns and Relations from the World Wide Web. In the WebDB Workshop at 6th International Conference on Extending Database Technology (EDBT), 1998.
    • HITS and SALSA: Mahmoud Fouz, Oct 29
      • Jon M. Kleinberg. Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment. In Proceedings of the Ninth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithm s , pp. 668-677, January 1998.
• November 5: No class due to CIKM 2007, TREC, etc.
• November 12:
  • Update on the Class Project.
  • Student Presentations:
    • The Google File System: Andrew Kane
      • Sanjay Ghemawat, Howard Gobioff, and Shun-Tak Leung. The Google File System. In 19th ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles, Lake George, NY, October, 2003.
    • Information Extraction: Luiz Gomes
      • Ralph Grishman. Information Extraction: Techniques and Challenges. In International Summer School on Information Extraction: A Multidisciplinary Approach To An Emerging Information Technology Lecture Notes In Computer Science, vol. 1299, Springer-Verlag, pp. 10-27, 1997.
    • Semantic Search: Xin Liu
      • Markus Krötzsch, Denny Vrandecic, Max Völkel, Heiko Haller, and Rudi Studer. Semantic Wikipedia. Journal of Web Semantics,5(4), December 2007. R. Guha, Rob McCool and Eric Miller.
    • Visualizing Results: Richard Fung
      • Marti A. Hearst. TileBars: Visualization of term distribution information in full text information access. In CHI'95 , pp. 59-66, Denver, Colorado, May 1995.
    • Probabilistic LSA: John Whissel
      • Thomas Hofmann. Probabilistic Latent Semantic Indexing. In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Berkeley, August, 1999.
    • Implicit User Feedback: Hao Zhang
      • Thorsten Joachims, Laura Granka, Bing Pan, Helene Hembrooke and Geri Gay. Accurately Interpreting Clickthrough Data as Implicit Feedback. In Proceedings of the 28th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Salvador, Brazil, 2005.
• November 19:
  • Update on the Class Project.
  • Student Presentations:
    • Advertising: Mosharaf K Chowdhury
      • Andrei Broder, Marcus Fontoura, Vanja Josifovski and Lance Riedel. A Semantic Approach to Contextual Advertising. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual international ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, July 2007.
    • Parallel Search Engines: Patrick Kling
      • Alistair Moffat, William Webber and Justin Zobel. Load Balancing for Term-Distributed Parallel Retrieval. In Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information retrieval, pp. 348-355, Seattle, 2006.
    • Chinese IR: Ye Hu
      • Schubert Foo and Hui Li. Chinese Word Segmentation and its Effect on Information Retrieval. Information Processing & Management, 40(1),pp. 161-190 January 2004.
    • Web Crawlers: Patrick Nicholson
      • J. Cho and H. Garcia-Molina. Effective Page Refresh Policies for Web Crawlers. ACM Transactions on Database Systems, 28(4):390-426, 2003.
    • Content Oriented Image Retrieval: Taehyun Park
      • John R. Smith and Shih-Fu Chang. VisualSEEk: A Fully Automated Content-Based Image Query System. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM international Conference on Multimedia, Boston, November, 1996.
    • Impact Ordering : Kan Yang
      • Vo Ngoc Anh and Alistair Moffat. Improved Retrieval Effectiveness Through Impact Transformation. In Proceedings of the 13th Australasian Database Conference Melbourne, Australia, 2002.
• November 26:
  • Update on the Class Project.
  • Student Presentations:
    • Graded Relevance Assessment: Qi Zhang, Nov 26
      • K. Järvelin and J. Kekäläinen. Cumulated Gain-based Evaluation of IR techniques. ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 20(4):422-446, 2002.
    • Stemming and Stopwords for English: Gerald Leung, Nov 26
      • M. F. Porter. An algorithm for suffix stripping. Program, 14, pp. 130-137, 1980.
    • Speech Retrieval: Jack Wang, Nov 26
      • Jonathan Mamou, Bhuvana Ramabhadran, and Olivier Siohan. Vocabulary Independent Spoken Term Detection. In Proceedings of the 30th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, Amsterdam, July 2007.
    • Image Annotation: Kate Kinnear, Nov 26
      • Jia Li and James Z. Wang. Real-Time Computerized Annotation of Pictures. In Proceedings of the 14th Annual ACM International Conference on Multimedia, Santa Barbara, California, 2006.
    • Personal Information Stores: Jaime Ruiz, Nov 26
      • Vannevar Bush. As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly, 176(1):101-108, July 1945.
    • Intrusion Detection: Tung Tran, Nov 26
      • R. Anderson and A. Khattak. The Use of Information Retrieval Techniques for Intrusion Detection. In First International Workshop on Recent Advances in Intrusion Detection, 1998.
• December 3:
  • Final results for the Class Project.
  • Student Presentations (the last three will be presented after 4:30):
    • Learning to Rank: Gus Gutoski
      • C. J. C. Burges, T. Shaked, E. Renshaw, A. Lazier, M. Deeds, N. Hamilton and G. Hullender. Learning to Rank using Gradient Descent. In Proceedings of the 22nd International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 89-96, Bonn, Germany, 2005.
    • Music IR: Herman Lee
      • Jeremy Pickens. A Comparison of Language Modeling and Probabilistic Text Information Retrieval Approaches to Monophonic Music Retrieval. In Proceedings of International Symposium on Music Information Retrieval, Plymouth, Massachusetts, 2000.
    • Web Spam: Bill Rosgen
      • Gynogyi and Garcia-Molina. Web Spam Taxonomy. In Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Adversarial Information Retrieval on the Web (AIRWeb), 2005.
    • The Wikipedia: Jakub Gawryjolek
      • Jakub Gawryjolek and Piotr Gawrysiak. The Analysis and Visualization of Entries in the Wiki Services. In Fifth Atlantic Web Intelligence Conference, 2007.
    • Cross-Linugal IR: Chen Chen
      • Fredric C. Gey and Douglas W. Oard. The TREC-2001 Cross-Language Information Retrieval Track: Searching Arabic Using English, French or Arabic Queries. In Tenth Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2001), Gaithersburg, Maryland, November 2001.
        
    • Personal IR: Amod Gupta
      • Susan Dumais, Edward Cutrell, JJ Cadiz, Gavin Jancke, Raman Sarin and Daniel C. Robbins. Stuff I've Seen: A System For Personal Information Retrieval And Re-Use. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Informaion Retrieval, Toronto, 2003.
    • Rank Aggregation: Anusha Mallampalli
      • Cynthia Dwork, Ravi Kumar, Moni Naor and D. Siva Kumar. Rank Aggregation Methods for the Web. In Proceedings of the 10th World Wide Web conference, 2001.
    • Geographic Information Systems: Adam Bains
      • Taro Tezuka, Takeshi Kurashima and Katsumi Tanaka. Toward Tighter Integration of Web Search with a Geographic Information System. In Proceedings of the 15th World Wide Web conference, 2006.

Course resources

• Course overview
• Our Book
• Another Book
• The Wumpus Search Engine
• to be continued...