In an Information Age promising instant access to seemingly limitless information, achieving this promise in practice requires effective automation for managing our vast and ever-growing information repositories. Information Retrieval (IR) is the study of methods for capturing, representing, storing, organizing, and retrieving unstructured or loosely structured digital information. While such information was once restricted to electronic documents, today's landscape of digital content is incredibly rich and diverse, including Web pages, news articles, books, transcribed speech, email, blogs (and micro-blogs), images, and video. The rise of the Web as a massive, global repository and distribution network has earned Web search engines and other Web technologies particular importance in organizing and finding information today.

This seminar course will provide a broad introduction to topics in IR via first-hand reading of published research articles. Weekly responsibilities will center on reading, summarizing, and discussing these articles. Over the course of the semester, students will also take turns presenting the articles and leading class discussion.

The course will culminate in a final project in which students perform novel research, individually or in groups, investigating a topic of their choosing in greater depth. Projects may include:

• writing a survey of existing research on a particular topic
• conducting a user study examining human factors in a deployed IR system
• implementing a new search algorithm or interface
• performing a novel analysis of existing IR systems
• ...

Prior knowledge of IR is not required but will certainly be useful. All interested and motivated students are invited to attend, and the breadth of readings and personalized final project are intended to serve the needs of those with particular interest in the field as well as non-specialists interested in gaining broader exposure and understanding of IR methods and systems.

Course Textbooks

None required. Some readings may be assigned from the following textbook which can be purchased, read online, or downloaded (chapter PDFs) for offline reading:

• Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schutze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008.

Other Online Books (for reference purposes)

[1]	G. Chowdhury. Introduction to modern information retrieval. 2004. [ .pdf ]
[2]	R. Baeza-yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto. Modern Information Retrieval. 1999. [ .pdf ]

Readings (preliminary and subject to revision, most still to be added)

[1]	A. Moffat, J. Zobel, and D. Hawking. Recommended reading for IR research students. In ACM SIGIR Forum, volume 39, pages 3-14. ACM New York, NY, USA, 2005. [ .pdf ]
[2]	A. Singhal. Modern information retrieval: A brief overview. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 24(4):35-43, 2001. [ .pdf ]
[3]	C. Zhai. A brief review of information retrieval models. 2007. [ .pdf ]