Dear students:

I would like to encourage you to take the CSCE410/810 Information Retrieval
course.  Here below is the announcement of course.

Have you googled lately?  Do you want to find out how Google searches?  What
about other search engines in general? Have you used WebMD before? AskJeeves?
How are these documents indexed so that they can be retrieved accurately and
quickly for the users?  What about information that is visual or graphic?  How
do we index those items?  How do we search enterprise data?  How do we search
genomics data? How do we use information retrieval to filter out spam?  (How
does one filter out e-mail like this one that you are reading, based on
information retrieval techniques?)

Information retrieval is a topic that has many important application areas:
knowledge discovery, data mining, text understanding, ontology representation,
bioinformatics, image and video indexing, question-answering, spam filtering,
clustering, digital libraries, etc.

The objective of this class is to introduce students to the fundamentals of
information retrieval systems.  The course is organized into four stages.
First, the class will start by studying basic concepts in retrieval evaluation,
inverted files, lexical operations, and indexing and searching.  In the second
stage, the class explores more advanced topics such as thesaurus, query
modification, ranking algorithms, and clustering.  The third stage of the
class focuses on interdisciplinary research issues such as data mining,
knowledge discovery, digital libraries and visual information retrieval.
Finally, the fourth stage of the class will be seminar-oriented, with
presentations in the areas of query manipulations, routing and retrieval
algorithms (exploring blogosphere, question-answering, spam-filtering, 
enterprise data search, retrieval in genomics, etc.), and machine learning 
towards improving information retrieval.

Grading is based on class participation, 4 homework assignments, one
examination, a group presentation and a group final project.  The group final
project will be based on the 2007 TREC Tracks (Blog, Enterprise, Genomics,
Legal, Million Query, Question Answering, and SPAM).  The Blog track, for
example, is to explore information seeking behavior in the blogosphere!
  The number of students enrolled in the class will decide the actual 
syllabus of the class.

Readings will be based on the textbook: Baeza-Yates, R. and B. Ribeiro-Neto
(1999).  Modern Information Retrieval, New York: Addison-Wesley.

Key Info
--------

* This class counts as one of the Application track topics for graduate
   students, and counts as one of the Informatics Focus Area courses for
   undergrduate students.
* Class times are 11:30 a.m.-12:20 p.m. MWF.   Classroom is at AVH 111.
* Students enrolling in this class should have had CSCE310.  Special
   permission from the instructor is possible if students have had significant
   programming experience.
* Last offering:
   http://www.cse.unl.edu/~lksoh/Classes/CSCE410_810_Spring06/index.html

Contact Info
------------

Name:   Prof. Leen-Kiat Soh             E-mail: lksoh@cse.unl.edu
Phone:  (402) 472-6738                  Office: 122E Avery Hall

Thank you very much for your attention,

LeenKiat