Personnel

The instructor:

James Allan
allan@cs
Room 350, computer science building
Office hours currently by appointment. Contact Kate Moruzzi at x5-3415 or kate@cs for an appointment.

The teaching assistant:

Niranjan Balasubramanian
niranjan@cs
Office hours currently TBA

Textbook

The following texts are recommended for this course. You should definitely acquire at least one of them.

  1. B. Croft, D. Metzler, and T. Strohman, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice. Addison Wesley, February 2009. [amazon]
  2. C. Manning, P. Raghavan, and H. Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, 2008. [cup]  The authors of this text maintain a web site with information about the book, including a couple of on-line versions of the text.

Grading issues

Your final grade in this class will be based upon homeworks, the components of a project, and two exams. A small portion of the grade is based upon class attendance and participation. The relative contributions of the parts are:

  • Homework 15%
  • Programming assignments 30%
  • Quizzes 5%
  • Midterm exam 15%
  • Final exam 15%
  • Project 15% (5% for oral presentation, 10% for final written report)
  • Attendance, participation, etc. 5%
The class will include three homework assignments and three programming assignments. Both sets of assignments are due as indicated on the assignment and the Web page. Handwritten homework is fine, but it must be legible. Late assignments will be accepted at the sole discretion of the TA, but in no case after a solution set has been handed out. Late assignments may receive only partial credit, also at the sole discretion of the TA.

The project will be largely self-selected by you and may involve little or lots of programming. The project will be chosen by you and approved by the professor. It will incorporate some advanced aspect of Information Retrieval. Projects may be done individually or in groups, though a group project must be more substantial than an individual project. The project will require regular (brief) writeups of the work as well as two in-class presentations: (1) a quick overview of the project and (2) a more detailed presentation of the results. A more detailed writeup summarizing all of the work will be due at the end of the semester.

Collaboration, Plagiarism, and Intellectual honesty

Your work must be your own. For anything other than exams, you are welcome to discuss general issues with other students, but the answer, the writing, and the final result that you hand in must be your own effort. Discussing or sharing answers to specific problems is considered dishonest. If you have questions about what is honest, please ask! One suggestion is never to write down anything while you're talking with someone about class work since that will require you to come up with the result again on your own later. You are strongly encouraged to cite your sources if you received extraordinary help from any person or text (including the Web), other than lecture content. Computer Science Department policy specifies that the penalty for cheating is (1) a final course grade of "F" and (2) possible referral to the Academic Dishonesty Committee.

For any material you hand in, you must appropriately indicate when you are using work of others. If you use verbatim or only slightly altered text, you must clearly indicate (quotation marks, indented text, etc.) that you are quoting another source and what that source is. If you refer to work done by others, even if you do not quote it, you should include a reference to the original source. It does not matter if that work was published or not: if it is work other than your own, you are obligated to make it clear that you are using that person's work. Plagiarism will not be tolerated in this class. Plagiarism is a type of cheating and will be treated accordingly: the penalty for cheating is (1) a final course grade of "F" and (2) possible referral to the Academic Dishonesty Committee. The campus writing program provides more information about plagiarism.

You may (but probably won't) be using copyright-protected software in the laboratory. Federal law and license agreements between the University and various software producers prohibit copying this software for any purpose. Such activity will be regarded as a form of cheating and will be dealt with as such.

Course policies

  • H1N1 virus.  This semester the University has requested that faculty be particular flexible with regard to absences due to flue.  If you come down with the flu, please let the instructor and/or TA know as soon as you possibly can so that we can work to accommodate your illnesses.  Do not come to class if you are ill.
  • Attendance. Students are expected to attend each class. Attendance will not be taken, but absence may be noted because the class is typically small. The official means of communication for this class will be in-class announcements, though every effort will be made to ensure that the course Web site is up to date.
  • Rescheduling exams. Exams may be taken other than at the scheduled time, but only under exceptional circumstances and then only if approved by the instructor well in advance of the exam. It is your responsibility to contact the instructor in advance and justify your cause. Makeup exams will rarely be the same as the original exam.
  • Neatness policy. Although there are no points for neatness it does tend to affect grades indirectly. Homework and exam answers should be clearly organized and not needlessly wordy. An illegible homework or exam will be given a grade of zero.
  • Incompletes. An incomplete will be given only when documented, exceptional circumstances beyond your control have made it impossible to complete the assigned work before the end of the semester. It is your responsibility to contact the instructor regarding any such problems well before the end of the semester. Note that general rules of the University allow an incomplete only if most of the work has been completed satisfactorily before the end of the semester, so that the incomplete can be finished within the first four weeks of the immediately following semester. They further state that if a substantial amount of work remains undone then a retroactive drop should be obtained and the entire course repeated.
  • Auditing. Official auditors will normally be expected to complete either all of the homework assignments, all of the project, or both the exams and to achieve at least a C-level performance on whichever they choose to complete. Anyone enrolled for audit should contact the instructor early in the semester to discuss the requirements for receiving audit credit for this course. If the course is heavily over-enrolled, audits may not be possible.
  • Office hours. The instructor will normally be available in his office during posted office hours. Outside of those hours, or times arranged on an appointment basis, he cannot be assumed to be available for course-related matters, even if in his office.