Course Schedule

Aug 25

Introduction to search: Exact-match retrieval

Readings: Ch 5.1

Aug 27

Introduction to search: DAAT, BM25, query operators

Readings: Ch 1, Ch 11.4.3

Aug 31

HW1 out

Sep 1

Introduction to search: QryEval

Readings:Ch 2.4.2

Sep 3

Offline evaluation

Readings: Ch 8-8.5

Sep 8

Query structure: Query processing & reformulation

Query structure: WINDOW operator

Best-match retrieval: VSM, language models

Readings: Ch 6.2-6.4.2, Ch 12.2-12.4

Sep 10

Query structure: Relevance and pseudo relevance feedback

Readings: Ch 9 - 9.2.2

Sep 14

HW1 due, HW2 out

Sep 15

Document representation

Readings: Ch 2 - 2.2

Sep 17

Index creation

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

Sep 22

Large-scale indexes

Readings:

Sep 24

Feature-based ranking models

Readings:

Sep 28

HW2 due, HW3 out

Sep 29

Feature-based ranking models, Authority metrics

Readings: Ch 21 - 21.2

Oct 1

Neural ranking models: Introduction

Readings:

Oct 6

Neural ranking models: BERT reranking

Readings: Dai & Callan, 2019a

Oct 8

Midterm exam

Readings: Sample Midterm, additional questions, recent questions

Oct 20

Neural ranking models: Sparse models

Readings: Nogueira, et al., 2019, Lin & Ma, 2021, Formal, et al., 2021

Oct 22

Neural ranking models: Dense models

Readings: Karpukhin, et al., 2020

Oct 26

HW3 due, HW4 out

Oct 27

Neural ranking models: Dense indexes

Readings:

Oct 29

Neural ranking models: Large language models and retrieval augmented generation

Readings: Gao, et al., 2023

Nov 5

Neural information retrieval: RAG and deep research

Readings:

Nov 9

HW4 due, HW5 out

Nov 10

Diversification: Measurement

Readings:

Nov 12

Diversification: Optimization

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

Nov 17

Personalization

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

Nov 19

Online evaluation

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

Nov 23

HW5 due

Nov 24

Recommender systems: Introduction and basic algorithms

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

Dec 1

Recommender systems: Feature-based models

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

Dec 3

Fairness

Readings:

Dec 3

Final exam

Readings: Sample Final