CS 276 / LING 286: Information Retrieval and Web Search

Lecture: 3 units, Tu/Th 4:15-5:30 at NVIDIA Auditorium (available online through SCPD)
Staff e-mail: cs276-spr1213-staff@lists.stanford.edu

Course Description

Basic and advanced techniques for text-based information systems: efficient text indexing; Boolean and vector space retrieval models; evaluation and interface issues; Web search including crawling, link-based algorithms, and Web metadata; text/Web clustering, classification; text mining.

Policies Information (grading, etc.)

Prerequisites: CS 107, CS 109, CS 161. Ideally the whole CS Major Core.

Online Resources

Coursera: CS 276 will be making use of online videos and quizzes as well as live class lectures, presentations, and labs. Visit Coursera to find video chunks and online exercises. We will be posting the required programming assignments and problem sets through Coursera, so signup soon (with your Stanford ID)!

Piazza: We strongly recommend that you post any questions about assignments, lectures or general course material on Piazza. It facilitates lively discussion among students, and allows others to benefit from the discussion too. Even if you think your question is specific to your implementation, you can use the 'private question' feature to address a question to the staff specifically. We will be using Piazza to post course announcements, so be sure to signup on Piazza soon too. Here is a quick introduction video.

Staff Email: If you really have a question about your situation in specific, that you do not think is not appropriate for the class forum (not even a private question), please email the staff mailing list at cs276-spr1213-staff@lists.stanford.edu.

Announcements:
If you are not registered in the course but wish to receive course announcements, you may subscribe to the guest mailing list cs276-spr1213-guests.

CS 276 Staff Information

Professors:
Chris Manning, Office Hours: Wednesday 3-4 PM, Gates 158
Pandu Nayak, Office Hours: after class with prior arrangement
Prabhakar Raghavan, Office Hours: after class with prior arrangement

TAs: Sonal Gupta (Head TA), Shui Hu, Anshul Mittal, Rukmani RaviSundaram, Thang Luong

TA Office Hours

For a detailed schedule, check out the Google calendar using the ID: f0qejqeg52qo292jk3i44lqd04@group.calendar.google.com

Daytime Office Hours

• Monday: Gates B24A 10-11am
• Wednesday: Gates B26B 11am-12pm
• Friday: Gates B26B 10-11am

Coding Sessions

• Tuesday: Bldg 160 Room 332 6-9pm
• Wednesday: Bldg 160 Room 332 6-9pm

For SCPD students, we will be available via Google hangout, links of which will be posted on Piazza.

Syllabus

Details of the schedule, videos, slides and reading lists will be updated as the quarter progresses.

Required Textbook:

IIR = Introduction to Information Retrieval, by C. Manning, P. Raghavan, and H. Schütze. Cambridge University Press, 2008.

This book is available from the Stanford bookstore (or your favorite book purveyor). You can also download and print chapters at the book website. (We’d appreciate any reports of typos or of higher-level problems for the third printing. Thanks.)

Other Good IR Books:

MG = Managing Gigabytes, by I. Witten, A. Moffat, and T. Bell.
IRAH = Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics by D. Grossman and O. Frieder.
MIR = Modern Information Retrieval, by R. Baeza-Yates and B. Ribeiro-Neto.
FOA = Finding Out About, by R. Belew.
MTW = Mining the Web, by S. Chakrabarti.
FSNLP = Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing, by C. Manning and H. Schütze.

These books all have useful information on topics that we cover and are recommended as references. MG is particularly good as a detailed reference for technical IR in the first half of the course. MTW covers many of the topics from the latter part of the course.

More detailed resources can be found here.

Lecturers:

CM = Chris Manning
PN = Pandu Nayak
PR = Prabhakar Raghavan

Related Courses:

Introduction to Computational Advertising (http://www.stanford.edu/class/msande239/)

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