Course Schedule
(Spring 2026 is here)

Aug 26

Introduction to search: Exact-match retrieval (pdf)

Readings: Ch 5.1

Aug 28

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

Readings: Ch 1, Ch 11.4.3

Sep 1

HW1 out

Sep 2

Introduction to search: QryEval (pdf)

Readings:Ch 2.4.2

Sep 3

Optional: Homework support session (pdf)
5:00-6:30, GHC 6115

Readings: HW1 page, HW1 Design Guide,

Sep 4

Offline evaluation (pdf),
Software integrity requirements (pdf)

Readings: Ch 8-8.5

Sep 9

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

Readings: Ch 6.2-6.4.2, Ch 12.2-12.4

Sep 11

Document representation (pdf)

Readings: Ch 2 - 2.2

Sep 15

HW1 due, HW2 out

Sep 16

Query structure: Relevance and pseudo relevance feedback (pdf)

Readings: Ch 9 - 9.2.2

Sep 18

Index creation (pdf)

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

Sep 23

Large-scale indexes (pdf)

Readings:

Sep 25

Feature-based ranking models (pdf)

Readings: Li, 2011

Sep 29

HW2 due, HW3 out

Sep 30

Feature-based ranking models, Authority metrics (pdf)

Readings: Ch 21 - 21.2

Oct 2

Neural ranking models: Introduction (pdf)

Readings:

Oct 7

Neural ranking models: BERT reranking (pdf)

Readings: Dai & Callan, 2019a

Oct 9

Midterm exam

Readings: Sample Midterm, additional questions, recent questions

Oct 21

Neural ranking models: Sparse models (pdf)

Readings: Dai & Callan, 2019b

Oct 25

Neural ranking models: Dense models (pdf)

Readings: Karpukhin, et al., 2020

Oct 27

HW3 due, HW4 out

Oct 28

Recommender systems: Introduction and basic algorithms (pdf)

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

Oct 30

Recommender systems: Feature-based models (pdf)

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

Nov 6

Neural ranking models: Dense indexes (pdf)

Readings:

Nov 10

HW4 due, HW5 out

Nov 11

Neural ranking models: Large language models and retrieval augmented generation (pdf)

Readings: Gao, et al., 2023

Nov 13

Diversification: measurement (pdf)

Readings:

Nov 18

Diversification: optimization (pdf)

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

Nov 20

Personalization (pdf)

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

Nov 26

HW5 due

Nov 25

Online evaluation (pdf)

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

Dec 2

Fairness: measurement (pdf)

Readings:

Dec 4

Final exam

Readings: Sample Final, Sample Final