• Teacher : Paolo Ferragina and Giorgio Vinciguerra
• Course ID: 289AA
• CFU: 6 (first semester)
• Language: English
• Question time: Monday 15-17 by appointment. The meeting will occur via video-conference in the virtual room of the course.
• Official Lecture's Log: Here it is the registro.
• News about this course will be distributed via a Telegram channel

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:

• study and analyze the main components of a modern search engine: Crawler, Parser, Compressor, Indexer, Query resolver, Query and Document annotator, Results Ranker;

• dig into some basic algorithmic techniques which are now ubiquitous in any IR application for data compression, indexing and sketching;

• describe few other IR tools which are used either as a component of a search engine or as independent tools and build up the previous algorithmic techniques, such as: Classification, Clustering, Recommendation, Random Sampling, Locality Sensitive Hashing.

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 the sum of two reported grades.

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.

• [MRS] C.D. Manning, P. Raghavan, H. Schutze. Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press, 2008. [ link ]
• Some copies of papers or notes (linked below).
• If you need to practice with exercises given at previous exams, please look at the pages of the course of the previous years, in the section where I list the exam dates, texts, and solutions.

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.