Announcements:

• To give you more time to run post-competition experiments using the released relevance judgments, the due date for the assignment 5 reports has now been extended to May 8, Friday. Please refer to the guidelines for suggestions for additional experiments and analysis.
• Due to a problem with DCShome directories, which has affected some students in finishing their homeworks, the deadlines for both Assignment #4 and the final report of Assignment #5 have been extended. Assignment #4 is now due on Friday, May 1st, and the final report of Assignment #5 is now due on Wednesday, May 6th.
• A sample midterm exam with solutions (Spring 2008) is available here. A detailed list of topics to be covered in the midterm is available here.
• TA's office hour on Tuesday has been moved to Thursday, 3-4pm.
• Due to the problem with disk quota, the deadline for the new task of assignment 5 phase 2 has been extended to Friday, March 20. The old task (i.e., crawled data) is due midnight, Wednesday, March 18. Assignment 3 is now due on Monday, March 30. Please turn in the hard copy of your written answer for Assignment 3 to Donna Coleman in 2106 Siebel Center.
• Due to the campus-wide power outage and the Engineering Open House 2009, the due dates of Assignment 3 and Phase 2 of Assignment 5 have now been extended to March 20 and March 18, respectively.
• A new task has been added to the Phase-2 part of Assignment 5, and the due date has been extended to March 11, 2009 (Wed). Please check out the updated version.
• If you experience a compilation error for assignment 2, please re-download the code from the assignment page
• Change of place for TA office hours: new place is room 0207 Siebel Center.
• Change of office hours on Feb. 18: Due to time conflict with a prelim exam, the instructor's office hours on Feb. 18 (Wed) will be 11:00am-12:30pm.
• The midterm has now been scheduled on April 15, 2009. A sample past midterm exam and solutions will be posted later for practice.
• More guidelines on how to choose a project topic and a list of sample project topics are now available on the course project wiki page.
• Change of office hours of TA: The TA's office hours are now 3-4pm, Tuesdays and 3:30-4:30pm, Wednesdays.
• Change of office hours: The instructor's office hours are now 9-10am, Wednesdays and 3:30-4:30pm, Fridays.
• The class will meet on Wednesdays and Fridays, 2-3:15pm in Siebel Center, room 1105. The first class will be on Jan 21, Wednesday.

As the amount of online textual information (e.g., web pages, email, news articles, office documents, and scientific literature) grows explosively, it is increasingly important to develop tools to help us manage and exploit the huge amount of information. Web search engines, such as Google, Yahoo!, and MSN, are good examples of such tools, and they are now an essential part of everyone's life. In this course, you will learn the underlying technologies of these and other powerful tools for managing text information. You will be able to learn the basic principles and algorithms for managing text information as well as obtain handson experience with using existing information retrieval toolkits to set up your own search engines and improving their search accuracy.

Unlike structured data, which is typically managed with a relational database, textual information is unstructured and poses special challenges due to the difficulty in precisely understanding natural language and users' information needs. In this course, we will introduce a variety of techniques for accessing and mining text information. The course emphasizes basic principles and pratically useful algorithms. Topics to be covered include, among others, text analysis, retrieval models (e.g., vector space and probabilistic models), text categorization, text filtering, clustering, retrieval system design and implementation, and applications to web information management.

The course is lecture-based. Grading is based on regular assignments, a late midterm examination, several two-minute in-class quizzes, and an optional course project which is only required for those who registered the course for 4 credit hours. For more information about the course policy, please see " Basic Information" of the course.