Course Description:
This course studies the theory, design, and implementation of text-based information systems. The IR core components of the course include statistical characteristics of text, representation of information needs and documents, several important retrieval models (Boolean, vector space, probabilistic, inference net, language modeling), clustering algorithms, automatic text categorization, and experimental evaluation. The software architecture components include design and implementation of high-capacity text retrieval and text filtering systems. A variety of current research topics are also covered, including cross-lingual retrieval, document summarization, machine learning, topic detection and tracking, and multi-media retrieval.

This course involves written assignments, and programming assignments such as search engine implementation and automatic text classification. Good programming skills are a prerequisite.

Course Syllabus