CSCE 670 - Information Storage and Retrieval (Fall 2026)

Course Information

Grading

Schedule (Subject to changes)

Week Date Topic Slides Optional Readings
W1 8/24 Course Logistics -
8/26 Overview of Information Retrieval, Boolean Retrieval [MRS Chapter 1]
8/28 Boolean Retrieval (Cont'd) [MRS Chapter 2]
W2 8/31 TF-IDF, Vector Space Model [MRS Chapter 6], [MRS Chapter 7]
9/2 BM25 [MRS Chapter 11]
9/4 Link Analysis: PageRank [MRS Chapter 21], [LRU Chapter 5.1]
W3 9/7 No Class (Labor Day)
9/8 Homework 0 Due (Tuesday)
9/9 Link Analysis: PageRank (Cont'd), HITS [LRU Chapter 5.2/5.5]
9/11 Link Analysis: Topic-Sensitive PageRank [LRU Chapter 5.3/5.4]
W4 9/14 Evaluation of Search Engines [MRS Chapter 8]
9/16 Evaluation of Search Engines (Cont'd) [Sakai, SIGIR'16]
9/18 Quiz 1 -
W5 9/21 Learning to Rank [MRS Chapter 14], [Nallapati, SIGIR'04]
9/21 Homework 1 Due (Monday)
9/23 Learning to Rank (Cont'd) [Joachims, KDD'02], [Burges et al., ICML'05], [Burges et al., NIPS'06]
9/25 Course Project Information Session -
W6 9/28 Recommender Systems: Basics, Content-Based Recommendations [LRU Chapter 9.1/9.2]
9/30 Recommender Systems: Collaborative Filtering [LRU Chapter 9.3]
10/2 Recommender Systems: Matrix Factorization [LRU Chapter 9.4]
W7 10/5 Recommender Systems: Matrix Factorization (Cont'd), Netflix Challenge [LRU Chapter 9.5], [Koren, KDD'09]
10/7 Recommender Systems: Bayesian Personalized Ranking [Rendle et al., UAI'09]
10/9 Quiz 2 -
W8 10/12 word2vec [Mikolov et al., NIPS'13], [Levy and Goldberg, NIPS'14]
10/12 Homework 2 Due (Monday)
10/14 word2vec (Cont'd), Neural Ranking [Pennington et al., EMNLP'14], [Tang et al., KDD'15], [Nalisnick et al., WWW'16]
10/16 Neural Ranking (Cont'd) [Karpukhin et al., EMNLP'20], [Mitra et al., WWW'17]
10/17 Project Proposal Due (Saturday)
W9 10/19 Transformer [Vaswani et al., NIPS'17]
10/21 Transformer (Cont'd), BERT [Devlin et al., NAACL'19], [Liu et al., arXiv'19], [Clark et al., ICLR'20]
10/23 BERT-Based Ranking [Dai and Callan, SIGIR'19], [Nogueira and Cho, arXiv'19]
W10 10/26 ColBERT [Khattab and Zaharia, SIGIR'20], [Thakur et al., NeurIPS'21]
10/28 Quiz 3 -
10/30 Neural Collaborative Filtering [He et al., WWW'17], [Rendle et al., RecSys'20]
W11 11/2 Sequential Recommendation [He and McAuley, ICDM'16], [He et al., RecSys'17]
11/2 Homework 3 Due (Monday)
11/4 Large Language Models Basics [Brown et al., NeurIPS'20], [Wei et al., NeurIPS'22], [Wang et al., ICLR'23],
[Wei et al., ICLR'22], [Ouyang et al., NeurIPS'22], [Kojima et al., NeurIPS'22]
11/6 Large Language Models with Search Engines [Lewis et al., NeurIPS'20], [Schick et al., NeurIPS'23], [Guo et al., Nature'25]
W12 11/9 Large Language Models with Search Engines (Cont'd) [Jin et al., COLM'25], [Kusumegi et al., Science'25]
11/11 Large Language Models for Ranking [Sun et al., EMNLP'23], [Qin et al., NAACL'24]
11/13 Large Language Models for Recommendation [Liu et al., arXiv'23], [Hou et al., ECIR'24], [Li et al., KDD'23]
W13 11/16 Agentic Search [Li et al., arXiv'26a], [Zhang et al., arXiv'26], [Li et al., arXiv'26b], [Lu et al., arXiv'26]
11/18 Quiz 4 -
11/20 Logistics for Project Presentations and Final Exam -
W14 11/23 Project Presentations (Zoom)
11/23 Homework 4 Due (Monday)
11/25 No Class (Thanksgiving)
11/27 No Class (Thanksgiving)
W15 11/30 Project Presentations (Zoom)
12/1 Project Presentations (Zoom)
12/2 Project Presentations (Zoom)
12/5 Project Report Due (Saturday)
W16 12/9 Final Exam