Course Code

COMP6714

Course Title

Information Retrieval and Web Search

Units of Credit

6

Course Website

https://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs6714/21T3/

Handbook Entry

https://www.handbook.unsw.edu.au/postgraduate/courses/2021/COMP6714/

1. Pre-requisites

The formal pre-requisite for this course is

  • For UG, MATH1081 and COMP2041 and COMP 2521

  • For PG, COMP9020 and COMP9024

The knowledge that we assume from these courses is:

  • experience with procedural programming, and an understanding of a range of data structures (e.g., trees, graphs, hash-tables) and algorithms (e.g., sorting, divide-and-conquer)

  • knowledge of discrete mathematics, including sets, logic, functions and relations, and graphs and trees.

2. Course philosophy and teaching strategies

The learning foci in this course are primarily lectures (theoretical knowledge) and projects (practical knowledge). The course will have an emphasis on problem solving for real applications.

Students will learn the main contents of the course through lectures.

3. Course aims

This course aims to introduce theories and methods of information retrieval, and practical issues regarding search engines.

The course is designed to be practical. As such, real-life examples of information retrieval will also be used throughout the course.

4. Learning outcomes

Students successfully completing this course will be able to:

  • understand the whole process of information retrieval and search engines

  • understand various document and retrieval models used in information retrieval

  • understand various indexing and query processing tehniques and their variants

  • develop solutions for real problems using existing technologies

  • appreciate the past, present and future of information retrieval and search engine technologies

The learning outcomes are closely related to UNSW graduate attributes 1 — 6.

5. Administrative Components

See the course homepage (http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~cs6714) for (up-to-date) information regarding Course Staff, Course Schedule, and Course Resource List.

As the course is continuously developing together with the information retrieval field, the course schedule is subject to change too. Please read the introduction slides (lecture notes of the first week) for the course schedule in the current offering.

6. Assessment

The assessment will have the following components:

ass1            : 25%
proj1           : 25%
final exam      : 50%

Both written and programming assignments are helpful to achieve deep understanding of the course materials and develop problem solving abilities.

Relationship to the Learning Outcomes:

  • All assignments and the final examination are used to assess whether you have achieved the objectives of the subject.

  • The programming assignment, in particular, give you the opportunities to engage in real problems, and helps you to develop in-depth understanding of the course materials and develop problem-solving skills.

Grading Criteria: Grading criteria for each assessment will be detailed in the specification.

Late submission: Assignments/projects submitted late are subject to late penalties, which are specified in the assignment/project specifications. No late submission is allowed if the specification does not specify the late penalty scheme.

Assignment submission: Assignment submission procedure is described in the assignment specification document, which will be linked to this page when the assignment specification becomes available. Generally assignments are submitted electronically using the give program running on the School’s computer systems (in labs, and on servers). Details are in the assignment specifications.

7. Reading e-mail

You should check your school e-mail frequently in case of announcements relating to this course. We assume that you read e-mail sent to your CSE account by the next working day during teaching sessions.

8. Academic honesty and plagiarism

Copying assignments is unacceptable. Assignments will be checked. The penalties for copying range from receiving no marks for the assignment, through receiving a mark of 00 FL for the course, to expulsion from UNSW (for repeat offenders). Allowing someone to copy your work counts as plagiarism, even if you can prove that it is your work.

There are several on-line sources to help you understand what plagiarism is and how it is dealt with at UNSW:

Make sure that you read and understand these. Ignorance is not accepted as an excuse for plagiarism. In particular, you are also responsible that your assignment files are not accessible by anyone but you by setting the correct permissions in your CSE directory and code repository, if using. Note also that plagiarism includes paying or asking another person to do a piece of work for you and then submitting it as your own work.

UNSW has an ongoing commitment to fostering a culture of learning informed by academic integrity. All UNSW staff and students have a responsibility to adhere to this principle of academic integrity. Plagiarism undermines academic integrity and is not tolerated at UNSW. Plagiarism at UNSW is defined as using the words or ideas of others and passing them off as your own.

If you haven’t done so yet, please take the time to read the full text of

The pages below describe the policies and procedures in more detail:

9. Course Material

  • All lecture notes, tutorial and lab notes will be posted on the course web site. These notes summarises the major contents and help you to understand the materials when you read the textbook later. You definitely need to read the corresponding chapters in the textbook to gain a full understanding of the course materials. 

[MRS08] Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan and Hinrich Schutze, Introduction to Information Retrieval, Cambridge University Press. 2008.
[CMS09] W. Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman, Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice. Pearson. 2009.
[JM19] Dan Jurafsky, James H. Martin, Speech and Language Processing (3rd ed. draft). 2019.

  • Reference books for this course are: 

[BCC10] Stefan Buettcher, Charles L. A. Clarke, Gordon V. Cormack, Information Retrieval: Implementing and Evaluating Search Engines, The MIT Press. 2010.
[BB99] Ricardo Baeza-Yates and Ber thier Ribeiro-Neto, Modern Information Retrieval, Addison Wesley. 1999.

10. Further information

  • Students enrolled in COMP6714 are expected to attend all classes

  • The use of School of Computer Science and Engineering computing laboratories is subject to rules described in the Yellow Form, which you acknowledge (electronic) receipt of when you receive your computing account. The Yellow Form also outlines what to do in case illness or misadventure that affects your assessment, and supplementary examinations procedures within the School of Computer Science and Engineering.

  • Information on UNSW Occupational Health and Safety policies and expectations

  • Equity and Diversity issues

11. Continual Course Improvement

Each year feedback is sought from students and other stakeholders about the courses offered in the School and continual improvements are made based on this feedback. UNSW’s Course and Teaching Evaluation and Improvement (CATEI) Process (http://www.unsw.edu.au/learning/pve/catei.html) is one of the ways in which student evaluative feedback is gathered. Significant changes to courses and programs within the School are communicated to subsequent cohorts of students.

There were no serious issues noted in the previous evaluation. We are making incremental refinements to preserve the already high standard of the course.

Yifang Sun