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.

3 hours per week.

Information Retrieval (M)

None

Examination 80%, coursework 20%.

Reassessments are normally available for all courses, except those which contribute to the Honours classification. For non Honours courses, students are offered reassessment in all or any of the components of assessment if the satisfactory (threshold) grade for the overall course is not achieved at the first attempt. This is normally grade D3 for undergraduate students and grade C3 for postgraduate students. Exceptionally it may not be possible to offer reassessment of some coursework items, in which case the mark achieved at the first attempt will be counted towards the final course grade. Any such exceptions for this course are described below. 

The coursework cannot be redone because the feedback provided to the students after the original coursework would give any students redoing the coursework an unfair advantage. It is impossible to generate an equivalent piece of coursework which replicates the original one because of the follow-up work which was done subsequent to the original submission and based on feedback given.

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. Describe the techniques in organising information;

5. Describe 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.

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