Textbooks

• Required : Richard K. Belew, Finding Out About: A Cognitive Perspective on Search Engine Technology and the WWW, Cambridge University Press, 2001. (ISBN: 0521630282) Errata, The FOA Web Site.
• Recommended: I. Witten, A. Moffat, and T. Bell, Managing Gigabytes:compressing and indexing documents and images(MG), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1999. (ISBN 1558605703)

  An (incomplete) online version of the FOA book is available here. Also check out the Errata.

  The following books may also be useful.

  • C.J. van Rijsbergen (1979) Information Retrieval (IR), Available online.
  • Karen Sparck Jones and Peter Willett (eds) (1997), Readings in Information Retrieval(RIR), Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, Inc., 1997.
  • C. Manning and H. Schutze (1999), Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing (SNLP), MIT Press, 1999.
  • Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Berthier Ribeiro-Neto (2000), Modern Information Retrieval (MIR), Addison-Wesley, 2000.

  Note that Rijsbergen's book is available online. All the other books, including the required textbook, have been put on reserve in the Grainger Engineering Library for this course; you can ask for them at the circulation desk. (SNLP and RIR are temporarily unavailable; they are expected to be available by Sept. 3.)

Selected papers

• What is the problem addressed? What are the research questions or hypothesis?
• Is the problem interesting? (e.g., would any one care about the solution to such a problem or the truth of the hypothesis?)
• Is the problem trivial or very easy to solve? Is the answer obvious?
• Has this problem been addressed before, and if so, are the existing solutions sufficient?
• What is exactly the proposed method? Why would we expect the method may solve the problem? How is the method compared with other existing methods or obvious alternatives, if any?
• What are the (experimental) results? Are the experiments well-designed?
• What are the major conclusions? Are you convinced that each claim in the paper actually holds?
• What are the major deficiencies of this work? Is there any way to further improve the work?

• What is Research in Computer Science
• Basic Research Skills in Computer Science
• Advice on Research and Writing (for computer scientists)

NLP-related resources

• Statistical natural language processing and corpus-based computational linguistics: An annotated list of resources (Stanford)

IR toolkit

• Lemur (CMU/Univ. of Massachusetts)
• Smart (Cornell)
• MG (Joint effort of several Australia universities)
• IR Systems and Tools

Some other online resources that might be useful

1. Development Related
   • Sample perl scripts
   • wget web crawler (a publically available web crawler, available on CSIL machines at /usr/dcs/software/supported/bin/wget)
   • Information Extraction Resouces (RISE) (A comprehensive list of IE-related projects, papers, people, and data sets, including the seminar data set)
2. Mathematics
• Tutorial on optimization theory and difference and differential equations by Martin J. Osborne
• Lagrange Multipliers without Permanent Scarring (by Dan Klein)
3. Tutorials
   • Explanation of some TREC evaluation measures
   • Lan Huang, A Survey On Web Information Retrieval Technologies
   • Stefano Mizzaro, Intelligent Interfaces for Information Retrieval: A Review
   • Ed Greengrass, Information Retrieval: A Survey
   • Search Engine Meeting 2002
   • A Roadmap to Text Mining and Web Mining
   • Data mining for hypertext: A tutorial