Course Schedule

There is also a Google calendar for office hours and important dates.

Jan 13

Introduction to search: Exact-match retrieval (pdf)

Readings: Ch 5.1

Jan 15

Introduction to search: DAAT, BM25, query operators (pdf)

Readings: Ch 1, Ch 11.4.3

Jan 19

HW1 out

Jan 20

Introduction to search: QryEval (pdf)

Readings:Ch 2.4.2

Jan 22

Offline evaluation (pdf)

Readings: Ch 8-8.5

Jan 22, 5:00-6:30, GHC 6115

Homework support session (optional) (pdf)

Jan 27

Query structure: Query processing & reformulation (pdf)

Query structure: WINDOW operator (pdf)

Best-match retrieval: VSM, language models (pdf)

Readings: Ch 6.2-6.4.2, Ch 12.2-12.4

Jan 29

Query structure: Relevance and pseudo relevance feedback (pdf)

Readings: Ch 9 - 9.2.2

Feb 2

HW1 due, HW2 out

Feb 3

Document representation (pdf)

Readings: Ch 2 - 2.2

Feb 5

Index creation (pdf)

Readings: Ch 4-4.5, Ch 5.3-5.3.1, Ch 2.3, Ch 7.1.3

Feb 10

Large-scale indexes (pdf)

Readings:

Feb 12

Feature-based ranking models (pdf)

Readings: Li, 2011

Feb 16

HW2 due, HW3 out

Feb 17

Feature-based ranking models, Authority metrics

Readings: Ch 21 - 21.2

Feb 19

Neural ranking models: Introduction

Readings:

Feb 24

Neural ranking models: BERT reranking

Readings: Dai & Callan, 2019a

Feb 26

Midterm exam

Readings: Sample Midterm, additional questions, recent questions

Mar 10

Neural ranking models: Sparse models

Readings: Dai & Callan, 2019b

Mar 12

Neural ranking models: Dense models

Readings: Karpukhin, et al., 2020

Mar 16

HW3 due, HW4 out

Mar 17

TBD

Readings:

Mar 19

Neural ranking models: Dense indexes

Readings:

Mar 24

Neural ranking models: Large language models and retrieval augmented generation

Readings: Gao, et al., 2023

Mar 26

Diversification: Measurement

Readings:

Mar 30

HW4 due, HW5 out

Mar 31

Diversification: Optimization

Readings: Dang & Croft, 2012, Santos, et al., 2010

Apr 2

Personalization

Readings: Eickhoff et al, 2014, Bennett et al, 2012

Apr 7

Online evaluation

Readings: Kelly and Teevan, 2003, Jiang et al., 2014

Apr 13

HW5 due

Apr 14

Recommender systems: Introduction and basic algorithms

Readings: Personalized Machine Learning (Ch 4), Fairness in Information Access Systems (Ch 2)

Apr 16

Recommender systems: Feature-based models

Readings: Personalized Machine Learning (Ch 5), Covington, et al., 2016

Apr 21

Fairness: Measurement

Readings:

Apr 23

Final exam

Readings: Sample Final