Module
Information Retrieval

Type
Master’s general module (30 hours)

ECTS
5

UoW credits
10

Coordinator
Tomasz Mikolajewski, PhD

Overall Aims and Purpose
The course provides information about the theory and practice of internet search engines. It explains their functionality and fundamental procedures for ranking the answers to the queries and how to get higher position of your onw web page therein. The explained methodology should help with finding ways of utilizing the information in the process of creating a personal catalogue of web references (also called links) for a specific topic area (a typical skill of an internet researcher). The topics for which the catalogs are built are chosen from a pool of potential master thesis’ fields of interest. The learning-by-doing approach lets students develop skills for practical searching and finding business-related information on the web. The course also presents mechanisms of how a real-life business information on the web may be acquired at a time- and cost effective basis.

Course Content

Each student is expected to choose or get assigned a subject area (referred to as topic in the sequel) for which a catalog of web links is to be constructed.

1. Concepts in information retrieval
Outline of the course. Search engines as one of the knowledge sources. Basic mechanisms behind the search engine.
2. Setting up the internet research workspace
Gathering references to the main world-wide search engines. Selecting the research topic and its first evaluation with respect to internet presence. Outline of the systematic internet research for chosen topics.
3. Formulating the basic questions
Finding representative and characteristic pages, homepages. Key thinkers and key research centers from the topic area.
4. Exploration of existing link catalogs and hub pages
Finding direct answer pages to basic question for the topic.
5. Deriving related questions from pages found
Managing of own queries, mastering queries. Principles of systematic exploration. Terminology of the topic. Finding official pages, authoritative pages. Company, organization and institutional homepages.
6. Exploring the variance of questions
Synonymy of questions. Finding related pages. Encyclopedic knowledge from the chosen topic. Geographically related sites. Page similarity. Language variants of the same content.
7. Exploring different types of content
Multimedia resources. frequently asked questions, tutorials, chat forums, users groups.
8. Bibliographical search
Finding books, periodicals, proceedings, tracking their authors and finding related materials.
9. Business-related information
Tracking company/organization activities – conferences, meetings, related cyclical events. Estimation of costs for information retrieval. Sentiment analysis.

Reading list

Essential
Baeza-Yates R., Ribeiro-Neto B., 1999. Modern Information Retrieval. Addison Wesley.
Power Searching For Everyone

Suggested further reading
Working Papers Concerning the Creation of Google
http://dbpubs.stanford.edu:8091/diglib/pub/projectdir/google.html