Information Retrieval - Special course, Summer 2003

Teaching personnel

Lecturer

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Fuhr

Dates

Description

Information Retrieval (IR) deal with information search in purely structured data like e.g. fulltexts or multimedia databases. Popular applications are web search engines, digital libraries and multimedia archives (e.g. for images).

Due to the vagueness of the information need and the uncertain representation of the content of the stored objects, standard database techniques are not appropriate. Instead, the concepts have to be extended to deal with vagueness and uncertainty. As the major focus is on content-oriented search, special techniques for representing the content of text and multimedia objects are required.

This lecture introduces the underyling concepts of IR and illustrates them based on special application areas.

Content:

• A) Basic concepts (information cycle, evaluation)
• B) Representation of content (free text search, documentation languages, special logics)
• C) Models (classic models, models for multimedia documents)
• D) Implementation of IR systems (layer model, visualisation, access paths, algorithms)
• E) IR tasks (retrieval, filtering, categorisation, topic detection tracking, text mining, message understanding, summarization)
• F) Application areas (web search engines, multimedia digital libraries, networked information systems, IR and databases)

Additional material

Besides the slides and the lecture notes, the following books and lecture notes are recommended:

• R. Baeza-Yates, B. Ribeiro-Neto: Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley.
  (The chapter about user interfaces and visualisation is online.)
• R. Belew: Finding Out About. A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW. Cambridge University Press.
• Reginald Ferber: Data Mining und Information Retrieval. dpunkt Verlag . (earlier version)
• C. J. van Rijsbergen: Information Retrieval (HTML version of the book from 1979, but still worth reading)

Lecture notes

(The lecture notes only partialy cover the content of the lecture, some parts are available only as slides.)

• Lecture notes (parts in German, parts in English)
• Appelt/Israel: Introduction to Information Extraction Technology

Slides

• Chapter 1+2 (in German)
• Chapter 3 (in German)
• Chapter 4 (in German)
• Chapter 5 (in German)
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10 (in German)
• Visualization
• Information extraction
• XML retrieval
• DigitalLibraries
• Multimedia indexing

Links

• Demos