Literature and examination

Literature

In the lecture plan (see ir14, Schedule and course plan in the menu to the left), we have stated the chapters and articles that should be read before each lecture.

Text Book

• C. D. Manning, P. Raghavan and H. Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

The book can be ordered from your favorite internet bookstore, and found using ISBN 0521865719. Virtually all material from the book, including material from the Stanford and Coursera courses by Manning, is also available online at nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.html.

Articles

• K. Avrachenkov, N. Litvak, D. Nemirovsky and N. Osipova, Monte Carlo methods in PageRank computation: When one iteration is sufficient, SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis 45(2), 2007.
• S. E. Robertson and K. Spärck Jones, Simple, Proven Approaches to Text Retrieval, 1994, www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-356.pdf.
• M. Sahlgren, An Introduction to Random Indexing, 2005, www.sics.se/~mange/papers/RI_intro.pdf.

Other Resources

To get an idea of state-of-the-art in Information Retrieval research and development, take a look at the program of the annual conference ACM SIGIR.

• ACM SIGIR 2013
• ACM SIGIR 2012
• ACM SIGIR 2011
• ACM SIGIR 2010
• ACM SIGIR 2009

Different benchmark datasets for evaluation of information retrieval systems can be found at:

• http://trec.nist.gov/
• http://www.clef-initiative.eu/
• http://research.nii.ac.jp/ntcir/
• http://www.isical.ac.in/~fire/

Examination

Assignments

The examination in the course is performed through:

• Three computer assignments (6 credits). The computer assignments are performed individually, and presented orally by the computer. Grade: A - F(fail).
• A project assignment (3 credits). The projects are performed in groups of 4-5 students, and presented with a short written report, as well as an oral poster presentation. Grade (normally the same for all group members): A - F(fail).

Details about the assignments themselves can be found under Computer Assignments and Project in the menu.

Grading

The course grade is the weighted average of the computer assignment grade and the project grade, according to the following: