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Lecture Slides and References

This page will be updated periodically.

Weeks 1 and 2: Information Retrieval and Search Systems

• Introduction
• Overview of Information Retrieval and Web Search
• Information retrieval model
• Search engine evaluations
• Open-source search engine Lucene
• Recording: Mon. Oct 5; Wed. Oct 7; Mon. Oct 12; Wed. Oct 14.

References:

• T. Yang, A. Gerasoulis, Web Search Engines: Practice and Experience in Computer Science Handbook (T. Gonzalez. Eds), Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2014.
• Apache Lucene tutorial
• CMS (Chapters 7 and 8)

Weeks 3 and 4: Learning to Rank

• Ranking and Learning
• Learning ensembles. Gradient tree boosting
  
• Project info
• Neural ranking
  
• Recording: Mon. Oct 19; Wed. Oct 21; Mon. Oct 26; Wed. Oct 28

References:

• CMS (Chapter 5.2)
• Y. Freund et al. An efficient boosting algorithm for combining preferences, J of Machine Learning Research, 2003
• Gradient tree boosting.
• A. Mohan, Z. Chen, K. Weinberger, Wearch Ranking with Initialized Gradient Boosted Regression Trees Journal of MLR, 2011.

Week 5: Neural Ranking and Deep Learning

• Continue on neural ranking
  
• SGD and deep learning
• Recording: Nov 2 recording failed. Here is a link to old lecture recording: Neural ranking I II
  Nov 4 Wed deep learning with SGD

References:

• J. Guo, Y. Fan, Q. Ai, and W. B.Croft. A Deep Relevance Matching Model for Ad-hoc Retrieval. Sllides. CIKM 2016.
• Xiong et al. "End-to-End Neural Ad-hoc Ranking with Kernel Pooling" in SIGIR 2017. The follow-up paper is Dai et al. Convolutional neural networks for soft-matching n-grams in ad-hoc search. ACM Inter. Conf. on Web Search and Data Mining (WSDM). 2018.
• Word embeedings tutorial. Another helpful blog.
• Calculus on Computational Graphs.

Week 6: Indexing

• Indexing (Partially presented in Week 5)
  
• Recording: Nov 9 Mon

References:

• CMS (Chapters 5.3-5.5)
• A. Z. Broder et al. Efficient query evaluation using a two-level retrieval process. ACM CIKM, 2003.
• S. Ding and T. Suel. Faster top-k document retrieval using block-max indexes. SIGIR 2011.

Week 7: Offline Data Processing Systems

• Offline data processing and systems support
• BERT contextual representation
• If time permits, Query Processing Architecture and Online Systems
• Recording: Nov 16 Mon (BERT), Nov 18 Wed (Offline)

References:

• MapReduce short guide
• Jacob Devlin et al. BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding, NAACL 2019.
• CEDR: Contextualized Embeddings for Document Ranking, SIGIR 2019 by MacAvaney, Yates, Cohan, Goharian

Week 8: Online Systems and Advanced Topics

• Continue on online query processing
• Duplicate analysis and similarity computing
• Privacy-aware search
• Recording: Nov 23 Mon (Online, Similarity), Nov 25 Wed (LSH)

References:

• Text book MRS Chapter 19.6 (Page 437-441)
• Mining of Massive Data Sets Chapter 3.4 (Page 91-96)