CS 276: Information Retrieval and Web Search

Information retrieval is the process through which a computer system can respond to a user's query for text-based information on a specific topic. IR was one of the first and remains one of the most important problems in the domain of natural language processing (NLP). Web search is the application of information retrieval techniques to the largest corpus of text anywhere — the web — and it is the context where many people interact with IR systems most frequently. In this course, we will cover basic and advanced techniques for building text-based information systems, including the following topics: - Efficient text indexing - Boolean and vector-space retrieval models - Evaluation and interface issues - IR techniques for the web, including crawling, link-based algorithms, and metadata usage - Document clustering and classification - Traditional and machine learning-based ranking approaches