COMPSCI 446 is an undergraduate-level course in search engines and in Information Retrieval, the the science and engineering of indexing, organizing, searching, and making sense of unstructured or mostly unstructured information, particularly text. The class provides an overview of the important issues in information retrieval, and how those issues affect the design and implementation of search engines. The course emphasizes the technology used in Web search engines, and the information retrieval theories and concepts that underlie all search applications.

Course Information

Negin
Instructor: Negin Rahimi Email address
Teaching Assistnats:
TA
Chang Zeng Email address
TA
Debrup Das Email address
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Vishal Garimella Email address
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Kyle Whitecross Email address
Undergraduate Course Assistants:
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Jeffrey Gomez Email address
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Shreya Nimbali Email address
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Riddhimaan Senapati Email address

Content

Prerequisites

Textbooks

Coursework

Programming Assignments (total 45%)

Assignments are submitted via Gradescope.

Homework (10%)

In-class Exercises (5%)

Midterm Exam (20%)

Final Exam (20%)

Extra Credit Points for Participation (up to 4%)

Any action that improves the class and is recognized by the instructor team may be considered for extra credit. Insightful contribution on Piazza is an example.

Syllabus

Date Topics
Week 1 Introduction
Week 2 Evaluation
Week 3 Processing text
Week 4 Indexing
Week 5 Lexical matching models
Week 6 Lexical matching models
Week 7 Statistical language models
Week 8 Statistical language models
Week 9 Web search engines
Week 10 Queries and interfaces
Week 11 Classification and clustering
Week 12 Learning to rank
Week 13 LLMs for IR, IR for LLMs

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