This document is available in PDF format for US letter size paper and for A4 size paper. Do not print out this web page, you will get an incomplete document.
Course Description
This course will introduce the students to the theory of information retrieval and its application in large-scale commercial database systems and on the web.
Course objectives
On completing this course, students
The /home/krichel/liu_admin/pslo.html aimed at by this course is 3E, "Students will demonstrate appropriate techniques for identification, selection, acquisition, retrieval, evaluation and synthesis of information from a variety of information systems and services."
Prerequisites
Students should have a basic command of the Microsoft Windows operating system because the machines in the lab run on this operating system.
Instructor
Thomas
Krichel
Palmer School of Library
and Information Science
C.W. Post
Campus of Long Island
University
720 Northern Boulevard
Brookville, NY 11548–1300
krichel@openlib.org
work phone: +1–(516)299–2843
Class structure
Classes will be held on the CW Post campus of LIU, between 19:00 and 21:00. After class students can stay on for guided practice. There will be a mixture of lectures and hands-on work in the lab. Provisional class details are:
| 1 | 2011–09–12 | introduction to the course |
| 2 | 2011–09–19 | history of information retrieval |
| 3 | 2011–09–26 | preprocessing of records and queries |
| 4 | 2011–10–03 | the Boolean model of retrieval |
| 5 | 2011–10–17 | introduction to search and to Dialog |
| 6 | 2011–10–24 | the Dialog command language |
| 7 | 2011–10–31 | Dialog by example |
| 8 | 2011–11–07 | vector model and ProQuest |
| 9 | 2011–11–14 | Credo and Gale |
| 10 | 2011–11–21 | web information retrieval |
| 11 | 2011–11–28 | Google and Bing |
| 12 | 2011–12–05 | Google Scholar, Web of Knowlegde, IR performance measures |
| 13 | 2011–12–12 | constructing a search interface |
To print the slides in Microsoft powerpoint, press control-p to print, then under "Print what" choose "Handouts", and under "Color/grayscale" choose "Pure Black and White". You can also use openoffice to print the slides.
Class mailing list
A mailing list for this class has been set up. Students who wish to stay informed are encouraged to sign up.
Readings
The powerpoint slides of the instructor are the reading prime reading material. The slides may point to other sources of reference as required.
Readings that the slides are derived from include van Rijsbergen (1979), Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto (1999), Manning and Raghavan and Schütze (2009) and maybe even Hock (2010).
Background readings on history include Lesk (1995), Schatz (1997), Salton (1987).
Historically significant contributions Luhn (1957), Spärk-Jones (1972), and Salton and Wong and Yang (1975). Bourne (1963) provides an overview over technology in the early 60s.
On Dialog, we use the Dialog Command Language Pocket Guide.
On search interface we will use Hearst (2009).
Some reference questions to work on are available.
Assessment
Each student will have to prepare a search exercise and report as detailed in the first lecture. It will count for 50% of the total grade. It is due on December 12. The report must not exceed five pages. Appendices are permitted, but may not get read. The remaining 50% will come from quizzes held at the start of each lecture except the first. Quizzes will last around ten minutes. The questions aim for a precise, short answer. The worst five quiz performances will be discarded when the average is being computed.
Contact hours breakdown
This is a breakdown of additional work that has to be done outside class by week. As per New York state regulations, the course needs to contain 120 additional hours of work outside class. This is an estimated breakdown of these times by week, as ordered by the Palmer School director.