Information Retrieval - Lecture, Summer 2006

Teaching personnel

Lecturer

• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Norbert Fuhr

Tutor(s)

• Dipl.-Inform. Sascha Kriewel

Formalia

Targeted audience

• DAI Hauptstudium with 12 credit points : Bereich "D"
• Kommedia Bachelor: Skript Kapitel 1-6.2.5.1, 9.1, 9.2;
  Folien zu Web-Suche und Summarization,
  (alte PO: ohne Übungen; neue PO: mit Übungen)

Dates

Description

Information Retrieval (IR) deals 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, cross-language retrieval, text mining, summarization)
• F) Application areas (web search engines, multimedia digital libraries, 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
• Gianni Amati, Cornelis Joost Van Rijsbergen Probabilistic models of information retrieval based on measuring the divergence from randomness ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS) 20, (4), 2002, pp. 357-389
• Norbert Fuhr:A Decision-Theoretic Approach to Database Selection in Networked IR. ACM Transactions on Information Systems

Links

• Demos
• XPath Explorer
• The XPathTester
• IPSI-XQ XQuery Demonstrator

Material for the tutorials

There is a Wiki for this lecture, where participants can collect information, notes and solutions for the course exercises. Details of accessing the Wiki for editing will be given in the first exercise. In addition we provide a mailing list, where participants can discuss problems and exercises, or ask questions.

Exercises and course assignments

(German only)

• Aufgabenblatt 1 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 2 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 3 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 4 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 5 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 6 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 7 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 8 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 9 (PDF), Zusatzmaterial (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 10 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 11 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 12 (PDF)
• Aufgabenblatt 13 (PDF)