Welcome to the Advanced Information Retrieval Systems course, ITEC-6210 for Fall term 2022. Materials, instructions, and notices for the course will accumulate here over the semester.

Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in the recent years with the expansion of the Web and the advent of inexpensive mass storage devices. As a result, traditional IR courses have become quite out-of-date which has led to the introduction of new and advanced IR course recently.

Unlike structured information, which is typically managed with a relational database, textual information is unstructured and poses special challenges due to the difficulty in precisely understanding natural language and users' information needs. In this course, we introduce a variety of techniques for organizing, searching and mining large text information.

This course is an advanced course that is offered to graduate students, researchers and professionals in the IT field. This course introduces the students to some advanced techniques used in information retrieval and studies the theory, design, and implementation of text-based information retrieval systems. Specifically, the course will expose the students to some of the core technologies on Information Retrieval and its applications on Web and biomedical research etc. It will mainly focus on research projects, paper review and presenation of research papers. In particular, this course will be taught in a research oriented style. Grading is based on a large research project, a final examination, research papers, assignments and presentations. There is a big research component in this course. The assignments generally involve implementing and experimenting with an idea/method on real text data. The final course project is to give the students hands-on experience on developing some novel information retrieval and search tools.