Information Retrieval - Academic Year 2010/2011

• Teacher : Paolo Ferragina
• Course ID: 289AA
• CFU: 6 (first semester)
• Language: English
• Lectures Schedule: Monday 14-16 (room C1) and Thursday 9-11 (room I1)
• Question time: Monday or Thursday at 11-12.30, Room 295 (Ferragina's office), Dept of Computer Science.
• Official Lecture's Log: The schedule and content of the lectures is available with the official registro.
• News about this course will be distributed via a Tweeter-channel with hashtag #ir2010

Study, design and analysis of IR systems which are efficient and effective to process, mine, search, cluster and classify documents, coming from textual, html or XML data collections. In particular, we will:

• describe the main components of a modern search engine: Crawler, Parser, Compressor, Indexer, Query resolver, Results Ranker, Results Classifier/Clusterer;

• present and use in the Lab some interesting Open-Source Tools for IR applications, such as Lucene and Web graph;

• introduce some basic algorithmic techniques which are now ubiquitous in any IR application for data classification, compression, clustering, projection, and sketching.

Project assigned during the course, plus an oral discussion concerning with the project and the course material.

• C.D. Manning, P. Raghavan, H. Schutze. Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, 2008. [ link ]
• Chapter 2 on “Text compression” of Managing Gigabytes, I.H. Witten and A. Moffat and T.C. Bell, Morgan Kauffman, Second edition, 1999.