Information Retrieval

Information retrieval, also abbreviated IR, is the task of finding (or retrieving) text documents that contain some desired information (e.g., the answer to a user’s search query) from a large collection of documents.

Lecture

Demo Notebook

• Text Preprocessing

Lab

In this lab, you will apply basic techniques from information retrieval to implement the core of a minimalistic search engine.

Download Lab 1

Reading Material

We recommend the following book, which has free online edition:

• Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schütze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008.

The material in this lecture focuses on the following parts:

• Sections 2.1–2.2 (tokenization and preprocessing steps)
• Chapter 6 (tf–idf and the vector space model)
• Sections 8.1–8.4 (evaluation metrics)