CFR5400

Information retrieval and browsing

K O'Yang

6 points
* 4 hours per week
* Second semester
* Peninsula
* Prohibitions: COT3201, COT4300

Objectives At the completion of this subject students should have a fundamental knowledge about information retrieval; acquainted themselves with the basics in design and management of a large scale retrieval systems; know how to provide and search for information encoded in large alphabet languages; acquired knowledge of how to provide and retrieve information via the internet.

Synopsis Basics of information retrieval: record structures and text processing, Boolean, probabilistic and vector-space models, search strategies, thesauri and clustering techniques, relevance evaluation and performance evaluation. Structured documents: markup languages, automatic indexing from markup, query formulation. User interfaces in IR: interface design for bibliographic retrieval (Z39.58) and image retrieval systems, visualisation of information in 2-D spaces, information filtering displays. Internet information retrieval: Gopher, WWW, Z39.50, retrieval using WWW (HTML, CGI, JAVA), resource discovery and search engines. Large alphabet language retrieval: encoding schemes, segmentation, stemming and thesaurus construction.

Assessment Examination: 40%
* Practical work: 40%
* Written (4000 words): 20%

Prescribed texts

Dillon M (ed.) Interfaces for information retrieval and online systems Greenwood Press, 1991
Frakes W B and Baeza-Yates R (eds) Information retrieval: Data structures and algorithms Prentice-Hall, 1992
van Rijsbergen C J Information retrieval 2nd edn, available online: http://www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/Keith/Preface.html