BLG 540E - Text Retrieval Systems

Course Objectives

Understand how search engines work
Understand the limits of existing search technology
Learn about the state of the art in IR research
Learn to analyze textual and semi-structured data sets
Learn to evaluate information retrieval
Learn about standardized document collections
Learn about text similarity measures
Learn about semantic dimensionality reduction
Learn about web crawling
Learn to use existing software
Understand the dynamics of the Web by building appropriate mathematical models
Build working systems that assist users in finding useful information on the Web

Course Description

The course will focus on the technology underlying the search engines. The basics of information retrieval systems such as information retrieval models, querying, and indexing; as well as more advanced topics including web search, language modeling based information retrieval, query expansion, text clustering and classification will be covered.