The first part of this course covers the foundations on Information Retrieval, including material necessary to understand how an IR system is constructed and functions -- in particular, the material needed to carry out the class project.   The following topics will be covered, though the order will determined in part by student interest and the projects that are selected.

1. Evaluation
2. Retrieval models
   • Language modeling, Boolean
   • Vector space, Latent Semantic Indexing
   • Probabilistic IR
3. Statistics of text
4. Indexing models (storing and accessing)
5. File organization
6. Efficiency, including compression
7. Clustering
8. Relevance feedback

The second part of the course covers advanced or more recent topics.  The actual topics selected will depend on student interest and the projects selected.  Much of this information will be taken from recent research papers on these topics.

1. Document filtering
2. Distributed retrieval
3. Web search
4. Question answering
5. Multimedia retrieval
6. Cross-language retrieval
7. Advanced evaluation issues
8. Interactive retrieval
9. Interation with Natural Language Processing
10. ...