Information Storage and Retrieval

• CRN 40263
• INFCSI 1030
• Room: LIS 404
• Time: W 6:00-8:50 p.m.
• Prerequisites:
• Text: R. R. Korfhage, Information Storage and Retrieval (available at CopyCat)
• Instructor: R. Korfhage

Latest page update: 1997 January 29. Office hours for Vichita. A glossary of terms is now available.

This is the first undergraduate course on information storage and retrieval.

• Instructor contact
• Teaching assistant
• Course syllabus
• Text and reference material
• Course projects
• Homework and examinations
• Grading policy
• Course notes

I am Bob Korfhage. My office hours are on Wednesdays, 3:00 - 6:00 p.m., and on Fridays, 12:30 - 2:00 p.m. I expect to be in my office (or at worst, in the building) during those times. At other times I can be reached by e-mail or telephone:

• e-mail: korfhage@sis.pitt.edu
  Please note: While I do have a CIS mail account, I don't read it very often. I read this account daily, so please use this one.
• office telephone: 624-9420
• home telephone: 421-1428

The teaching assistant for this course Vichita Vathanophas (vichita@sis.pitt.edu). Vichita is in 203 SIS, and her office hours will be Thursday, 1-3 p.m. Her phone is 624-1178.

The course syllabus is given in terms of the chapters in the notes.

Chapter 1, Overview
The information system
System measurements

Chapter 2, Document and Query Forms
The concept of a document
Documentary data structures
Document surrogates
Text, images, and sound

Homework: Exercises, Chapter 1.

Chapter 3, Query Structures
Matching criteria
Boolean queries
Vector queries
Probabilistic queries
Natural language queries

GUEST SPEAKER: Mark Geisler of BIOSIS, an information retrieval service for biological literature.
Chapter 4, The Matching Process
Relevance and similarity measures
Boolean-based matching
Vector-based matching
Proximity matching
Effects of weighting
Effects of scaling

Chapter 5, Text Analysis
Indexing
Term extraction and analysis
tf/idf weighting
Document similarity
Stop lists
Stemming
Thesauri

Chapter 6, User Profiles and Their Use
Simple profiles
Extended profiles
Current awareness systems
Retrospective search systems
Coordinating the query and the profile

Chapter 7, Multiple Reference Point Systems
GUIDO
VIBE
Boolean VIBE
BIRD

Midterm examination
Covering Chapters 1 through 6

Spring Break

Chapter 8, Retrieval Effectiveness Measures
Precision and recall
Operating curves and single measures
Sequence-related measures

Chapter 9, Effectiveness Improvement Techniques
Relevance feedback
Use of genetic algorithms

Chapter 10, Alternative Retrieval Techniques
Natural language processing
Citation processing
Hypertext links
Information filtering and passage retrieval

Chapter 11, Output Presentation
Reference vs. surrogate vs. document
Grouping and ranking
Media
VIRIs

Chapter 12, Document Access
Electronic access
Processing scanned documents
Processing electronically generated document
Distributed document systems
Internet archives

Searching the Web
Exploring Web browsers and search engines
Discussion of the Web experiments

Final examination

The notes for this course are the same as are used in the graduate IR course. However, they will be covered at a slower pace and in less depth. Unfortunately, there is no good published text available. The text that was used during the previous two offerings of this course was thoroughly disliked by the students; the only other text that I would regard as suitable is obsolete and out of print.

The first term project will be one done individually, and will consist of an exploration of the Web. There are a large number of Web search engines and browsers. For this project, each week you will be asked to search the Web using one or two of these search engines. There will be a set of questions for you to investigate, and a set of observations that you will be asked to make. Your project reports will be due at the beginning of class on April 16, and some of the results will be discussed during that class. Full details will be can be found at Web project.

A second term project will also be defined for the course. This will be a project that can be done either individually, or in groups of up to five students. You should plan to work on the project throughout the entire term. The output from the project will include a final report, and possibly other elements, depending on the definition of the project.

Homework is not normally assigned and collected for this course. However, the text contains exercises, and you are encouraged to read through the exercises, and to try to solve them. Any material in the text, including the exercises, can be discussed in class or individually with either the instructor or the teaching assistant. There will be two examinations for the course, a midterm and a final. The midterm will cover all material discussed up to that point. The final examination will focus primarily on material covered since the midterm, but may also include some earlier course material.

The course grade will be determined largely by three factors: the two examinations and the project work. These will be given roughly equal weight. (It has been my experience that the actual weighting can be varied widely without affecting the final letter grades.) If you work as a member of a project team, you may be asked to explain your individual role on the project.

From time to time notes relevant to the course will be added here. Please check this source regularly.