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Lecture Slides and References

The topics, schedule, and lecture slides listed in this page are tentative, and will be updated periodically (e.g. weekly).

Weeks 1 and 2: Web Search and Information Retrieval

• Introduction
• Ranking and Learning
• Information retrieval model
• BERT contextual representation.
• Projects

References:

• T. Yang, A. Gerasoulis, Web Search Engines: Practice and Experience in Computer Science Handbook (T. Gonzalez. Eds), Chapman & Hall/CRC Press, 2014.
• CMS (Chapters 7 and 8) on retrieval models
• Project info
• An Introduction to Neural Information Retrieval by B. Mitra et. al 2017. Microsoft. A related tutorial on word embeedings.
• Xiong et al. "End-to-End Neural Ad-hoc Ranking with Kernel Pooling" in SIGIR 2017. Related DRMM paper in CIKM16.
• Pretrained Transformers for Text Ranking: BERT and Beyond, Andrew Yates, Rodrigo Nogueira, and Jimmy Lin, 2021

Weeks 3-4: Advanced Topics on Document Retrieval, Ranking, and Indexing

• Recent research progress on neural information retrieval
• Inverted indexing and sparse retrieval
  
• Project meeting (Mid. October).
• HW1

References:

• O. Khattab, M. Zaharia ColBERT: Efficient and Effective Passage Search via Contextualized Late Interaction over BERT SIGIR 2020. ColbertV2 .
• Y. Yang et al., Compact Token Representations with Contextual Quantization for Efficient Document Re-ranking. ACL'22.
• SPLADE and SPLADE v2 SIGIR 2021 and 2022.
• RocketQA EMNLP 2021 and NAACL 2021.

Weeks 5- 7: Offline Processing, Online Systems, and Selected Topics

• Background: SGD and deep learning
• More on search engine evaluations
• Offline data processing and systems support
• Duplicate analysis and similarity computing
• Query Processing Architecture and Online Systems
• Background: Learning ensembles.
• HW2

References:

• MapReduce short guide
• Text book MRS Chapter 19.6 (Page 437-441)
• Mining of Massive Data Sets Chapter 3.4 (Page 91-96)
• Y. Freund et al. An efficient boosting algorithm for combining preferences, J of Machine Learning Research, 2003

Weeks 8-10: TBD and Group Presentations

• Group presentations