CS 525/DS 595: Information Retrieval & Social Web
Wednesday 6:00pm - 8:50pm, via a Zoom meeting
Instructor: Kyumin Lee
Office Hours: Tuesday 9:30am - 10:30am and Wednesday 4:00pm - 5:00pm, via a Zoom meeting
Email: kmlee (at) wpi.edu
Teaching Assistant: Di You
Office Hours: Thursday and Friday 2:00pm - 3:00pm, via a Zoom meeting
Email: dyou (at) wpi.edu
Course Summary
This course introduces theory, design, and implementation of text-based and Web-based information retrieval systems. Students learn components and operation of search engines providing search services. Components include web crawlers, indexers, link-based ranking algorithms, and recommender systems.
By the end of the semester students will be able to:
- Understand the key concepts and models relevant to information storage and retrieval, including efficient text indexing, vector space model, Web search.
- Design, implement, and evaluate the core algorithms underlying a fully functional IR system, including the indexing, retrieval, and ranking components.
- Identify the salient features and apply recent research results in information storage and retrieval, including topics such as adversarial information retrieval, and social information management.
Communication
All course announcements will be posted via the Canvas course mailing list.
Prerequisites
I expect all students to have had some previous exposure to basic probability, statistics, algorithms, and data structures. You should be able to design and develop large programs and learn new software libraries on your own. All programming assignments will be in Python.
Textbooks
Primary Textbook is
Additional course readings will be drawn from the following resources:
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(MMD) Mining of Massive Datasets (2014). Jure Leskovec, Anand Rajarman and Jeffrey D. Ullman. Cambridge University Press.
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Research papers selected by the instructor
Grading (tentative)
- Attendance and in-class discussion 2.5%
- In-Class Quizzes 2.5%
- Assignments 24%
- Midterm 20%
- Final 20%
- Project 31%
The detailed information regarding the grading is described in the syllabus.