Search Engines and Information Retrieval Systems

Current/next class: ir12.

A course in Computer Science focusing on basic theory, models, and methods for information retrieval.

Learning Outcomes

After completing the course you will be able to:

• explain the concepts of indexing, vocabulary, normalization and dictionary in Information Retrieval,
• give an account of different text similarity measures, and select a similarity measure suitable for the problem at hand,
• define a boolean model and a vector space model, and explain the differences between them,
• implement a method for ranked retrieval of a very large number of documents with hyperlinks between them,
• evaluate information retrieval algorithms, and give an account of the difficulties of evaluation,
• give an account of the structure of a Web search engine.

Content

Basic and advanced techniques for information systems: information extraction; efficient text indexing; indexing of non-text data; Boolean and vector space retrieval models; evaluation and interface issues; structure of Web search engines.