To present students with an in-depth examination of the theoretical and practical issues involved in providing tools to access large collections of documents, especially in the context of the World Wide Web.

To present students with the practical engineering issues raised by the design and implementation of an information retrieval system.

TBC

None

None

Exam 80%, coursework 20%.

To present students with an in-depth examination of the theoretical and practical issues involved in providing tools to access large collections of documents, especially in the context of the World Wide Web.

To present students with the practical engineering issues raised by the design and implementation of an information retrieval system.

By the end of the course students will be able to:

1. Implement a standard information retrieval (IR) system;

2. Discuss the theoretical basis behind the standard models of IR (e.g. Boolean, Vector-space, and Probabilistic models);

3. Discuss how an IR system should be evaluated in terms of the system's performance and the user's satisfaction with the system;

4. Understand the concepts behind the different retrieval models including advanced machine learning models such as learning to rank;

5. Understand the techniques involved in retrieving information from the World Wide Web;

6. Describe the practical engineering issues raised by the implementation of a search engine for the Web;

7. Understand techniques and architectures necessary to speed up the retrieval process for large-scale IR systems.

Students must submit at least 75% by weight of the components (including class tests) of the course's summative assessment.