Study, design and analysis of IR systems which are efficient and effective to process, mine, search, cluster and classify documents, coming from textual as well as any unstructured domain. In the lectures, we will:
| Week Schedule | ||
|---|---|---|
| Day | Time Slot | Room |
| Monday | 11:00 - 13:00 | Room C (Polo Fibonacci) |
| Tuesday | 9:00 - 11:00 | Room C (Polo Fibonacci) |
The exam will consist of a written test including two parts: exercises and “oral” questions. The exam is passed if in both parts the student gets a sufficient score (expressed as 20+10), which are then summed.
The first (exercises) and the second (theory questions) parts of the exam can be split into different exam dates, even of different exam sessions. The exam dates are the ones indicated in the calendar on ESAMI. In the case that the second part is not passed or the student abandons the exam, (s)he can keep the rank of the first exam, but this may occur just once. The second time this happens, the rank of the first part is dropped, and the student has to do both parts again.
| Date | Room | Text | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17/01/23, start at 09:00 | room E | text, solution, results | Correction will occur tomorrow Wednesday 18 January, at 16:00 (Ferragina's office). For registration only, just send me an email to accept the rank. Students that have passed only the “exercises” part can repeat only the “theory” part on any of the following exam dates, they have to register on the portal “ESAMI” writing in the notes “only theory”. Moreover, they can come +45mins after the start of the exam, to join the class that did in the first hour the “exercises” part. |
| 08/02/23, start at 11:00 | room A1 | text, results, solution | Correction will occur Monday 13 January, at 11:00 (Ferragina's office). For registration only, just send me an email to accept the rank. Students that have passed only the “exercises” part can repeat only the “theory” part on any of the following exam dates, they have to register on the portal “ESAMI” writing in the notes “only theory”. Moreover, they can come +45mins after the start of the exam, to join the class that did in the first hour the “exercises” part. |
| 05/06/2023, start at 16:00 | room C | text | |
| 05/07/2023, start at 11:00 | room A1 | text | |
| 24/07/2023, start at 14:00 | room C | text | |
| 07/09/2023, start at 14:00 | room A1 | text |
Video-lectures of last year are available at the link and they are linked just for reference, if you wish to re-check something you listened in class. This year, lectures are in presence and the program of the course could be different.
| Date | Argument | Refs |
|---|---|---|
| 19.09.2022 | Introduction to the course: modern IR, not just search engines! Boolean retrieval model. Matrix document-term. Inverted list: dictionary + postings. How to implement an AND, OR and NOT queries, and their time complexities. | Slides. Chapter 1 of [MRS] |
| 20.09.2022 | Skip pointers, Zone indexes, Web search engine: its structure, difficulties in their design and their epochs. The Web graph: some useful structural properties (such as Bow Tie). | Slides. Sections 19.1, 19.2, 19.4 of [MRS]. |
| 27.09.2022 | Crawling: problems and algorithmic structure. An example: Mercator. The bloom filter: definition, time/space complexity and error bound. Spectral Bloom Filter. | Slide. Sections 20.1, 20.2 of [MRS]. For doubts on Bloom Filters see paper. |
| 03.10.2022 | Consistent Hashing. Web graph compression: properties of the web, power laws, and compressing the adjacency lists. | Sect 19.1 and 19.2 of [MRS] and this page and note for consistent hashing. Sect 20.3 and 20.4 of [MRS]. |
| 04.10.2022 | Locality-sensitive hashing: basics, hamming distance, proof of the probability bounds. Use in an off-line and in an on-line setting. Comparison between LSH and K-means for the clustering problem. Exact-duplicate documents: Karp-Rabin's rolling hash (with properties and error probability). Near-duplicate documents: Shingling, Jaccard similarity, min-hashing. | Slides 1, Slides 2. Sect 19.6 of [MRS] |
| 11.10.2022 | Min-hashing (with prob property). LSH on integer vectors. Cosine-similarity among vectors of real-features. Exercises on Consistent hashing, Web graph, hamming distance, LSH and shingling. | |
| 17.10.2022 | The issue of hierarchical memories: I/O-model. Index construction: multi-way mergesort, BSBI and SPIMI. Sketch on MapReduce. Distributed indexing: Term-based vs Doc-based partitioning. Dynamic indexing: two indexes. | Slides. Chapter 4 of [MRS]. |
| 18.10.2022 | More on Dynamic indexing: a cascade of indexes. Parsing: tokenization, normalization, lemmatization, stemming, thesauri. Statistical properties of texts: Zipf law: classical and generalized, Heaps law, Luhn's consideration. Keyword extraction: statistical, chi-square test. | Slides. Sect. 2.1, 2.2, 5.1 and 5.2 of [MRS]. |
| 24.10.2022 | Rake tool. Compressed storage of documents: LZ-based compression. Storage and Transmission of single/group of file(s): Delta compression (Zdelta). | Slide. Suggest reading a paper. |
| 25.10.2022 | File Synchronization (rsync, zsync). LSH for cosine similarity estimation. Exercises on file sync and zdelta. | |
| 31.10.2022 | Posting list compression, codes: gamma, variable bytes (t-nibble), Simple9, Group variable, PForDelta, Elias-Fano indexing. | Sect. 5.3 of [MRS] and Ferragina's notes (only the coders presented in class). Slides. Video |
| 07.11.2022 | Query processing: soft-AND. Phrase queries, biword index and positional index. Exact search: hashing. Prefix search: compacted trie, front coding, 2-level indexing. Edit distance with e-errors via brute-force approach, or Dynamic Programming (possibly weighted). Overlap measure with k-gram index. An index for e-error matches based on k-gram index (with false positives, no false negatives). | Sect. 2.3 and 2.4 of [MRS]. Slides |
| 08.11.2022 | Caching and Tiered index. An efficient filter for one-error match (with false positives, no false negatives). Wild-card queries (permuterm, k-gram). Phonetic match. Scoring and ranking spelling errors. | |
| 14.11.2022 | Text-based ranking: dice, jaccard, tf-idf. Vector space model and cosine similarity doc-doc and query-doc. Storage of tf-idf and use for computing document-query similarity. Fast top-k retrieval: high idf, champion lists, many query terms, clustering. | Sect 6.2 and 6.3 and 7 from [MRS], video, and slides |
| 15.11.2022 | Fast top-k retrieval: fancy hits. Exact Top-K: WAND and blocked-WAND. | |
| 21.11.2022 | Relevance feedback, Rocchio, pseudo-relevance feedback, query expansion. Performance measures: precision, recall, F1, DCG and NDCG. | Sect 8.1-8.3 and 9 [MRS]. |
| 22.11.2022 | Random Walks. Link-based ranking: PageRank. | Chap 21 of [MRS]. Slides. |
| 24.11.2022 | Extra lecture (16-18, room L1): Lab on ElasticSearch, please bring your own laptop and make sure you have a working installation of a recent version of Python and Anaconda. Use them to create a clean environment specific for this course. The only required package is ElasticSearch: install it via pip install elasticsearch. All material of the lecture is in this github. | Slides intro Slides on ElasticSearch |
| 28.11.2022 | Extra lecture: Lab on ElasticSearch and TagMe, please bring your own laptop. | Slides on TagMe |
| 29.11.2022 | Topic-based pagerank, personalized pagerank. HITS. Application to Text Summarization. | |
| 01.12.2022 | Extra lecture (room L1, 16 - 18): Entity Linkers and Knowledge Graphs. Projections to smaller spaces: Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI). | Chap 18 from [MRS]. Slides tagme and Slides LSI. |
| 05.12.2022 | Exercises | |
| 06.12.2022 | Exercises | |
| 13.12.2022 | Exercises. |