The Internet has seen the most extensive and most innovative application of information retrieval (IR) techniques to date, where search engines are the best example. You will learn through the course about the main challenges and bottlenecks in current search technologies, and about research efforts that address these issues. You will also learn how search engines work, and get hands-on experience in building a search engine from the ground up. Topics include: advanced techniques for text-based information retrieval; efficient text indexing; Boolean and vector space retrieval models; evaluation and interface issues; relevance feedback; Web search and search engines; crawling, Web agents, spiders, robots; link-based algorithms and ranking; tagging and summarization. The main assignments for the course will be a series of practical projects.

CECS 590 information