| Week | Date | Topic | Slides | Optional Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| W1 | 1/12 | Course Logistics | [Week 1] | - |
| 1/14 | Overview of Information Retrieval, Boolean Retrieval | [MRS Chapter 1] | ||
| 1/16 | Boolean Retrieval (Cont'd) | [MRS Chapter 2] | ||
| W2 | 1/19 | No Class (Martin Luther King, Jr. Day) | ||
| 1/21 | TF-IDF, Vector Space Model | [Week 2] | [MRS Chapter 6], [MRS Chapter 7] | |
| 1/23 | BM25 | [MRS Chapter 11] | ||
| W3 | 1/26 | Link Analysis: PageRank | [MRS Chapter 21], [LRU Chapter 5.1] | |
| 1/26 | Homework 0 Due (Monday) | |||
| 1/28 | Link Analysis: PageRank (Cont'd), HITS | [LRU Chapter 5.2/5.5] | ||
| 1/30 | Link Analysis: Topic-Sensitive PageRank | [LRU Chapter 5.3/5.4] | ||
| W4 | 2/2 | Evaluation of Search Engines | [MRS Chapter 8] | |
| 2/4 | Evaluation of Search Engines (Cont'd) | [Sakai, SIGIR'16] | ||
| 2/6 | Quiz 1 | - | ||
| W5 | 2/9 | Learning to Rank | [MRS Chapter 14], [Nallapati, SIGIR'04] | |
| 2/9 | Homework 1 Due (Monday) | |||
| 2/11 | Learning to Rank (Cont'd) | [Joachims, KDD'02], [Burges et al., ICML'05], [Burges et al., NIPS'06] | ||
| 2/13 | Course Project Information Session | - | ||
| W6 | 2/16 | Recommender Systems: Basics, Content-Based Recommendations | [LRU Chapter 9.1/9.2] | |
| 2/18 | Recommender Systems: Collaborative Filtering | [LRU Chapter 9.3] | ||
| 2/20 | Recommender Systems: Matrix Factorization | [LRU Chapter 9.4] | ||
| W7 | 2/23 | Recommender Systems: Matrix Factorization (Cont'd), Netflix Challenge | [LRU Chapter 9.5], [Koren, KDD'09] | |
| 2/25 | Recommender Systems: Bayesian Personalized Ranking | [Rendle et al., UAI'09] | ||
| 2/27 | Quiz 2 | - | ||
| W8 | 3/2 | word2vec | [Mikolov et al., NIPS'13], [Levy and Goldberg, NIPS'14] | |
| 3/2 | Homework 2 Due (Monday) | |||
| 3/4 | word2vec (Cont'd), Neural Ranking | [Pennington et al., EMNLP'14], [Tang et al., KDD'15], [Nalisnick et al., WWW'16] | ||
| 3/6 | Neural Ranking (Cont'd) | [Karpukhin et al., EMNLP'20], [Mitra et al., WWW'17] | ||
| 3/7 | Project Proposal Due (Saturday) | |||
| W9 | 3/9 | No Class (Spring Break) | ||
| 3/11 | No Class (Spring Break) | |||
| 3/13 | No Class (Spring Break) | |||
| W10 | 3/16 | Transformer | [Vaswani et al., NIPS'17] | |
| 3/18 | BERT, BERT-Based Ranking | [Devlin et al., NAACL'19], [Clark et al., ICLR'20], [Dai and Callan, SIGIR'19] | ||
| 3/20 | BERT-Based Ranking (Cont'd) | [Nogueira and Cho, arXiv'19], [Khattab and Zaharia, SIGIR'20], [Thakur et al., NeurIPS'21] | ||
| W11 | 3/23 | Neural Collaborative Filtering | [He et al., WWW'17], [Rendle et al., RecSys'20] | |
| 3/25 | Quiz 3 | - | ||
| 3/27 | Sequential Recommendation | [He and McAuley, ICDM'16], [He et al., RecSys'17] | ||
| W12 | 3/30 | 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] |
|
| 3/30 | Homework 3 Due (Monday) | |||
| 4/1 | Large Language Models with Search Engines | [Lewis et al., NeurIPS'20], [Schick et al., NeurIPS'23], [Guo et al., Nature'25] | ||
| 4/3 | No Class (Reading Day) | |||
| W13 | 4/6 | Large Language Models with Search Engines (Cont'd) | [Jin et al., COLM'25], [Kusumegi et al., Science'25] | |
| 4/8 | Large Language Models for Ranking | [Sun et al., EMNLP'23], [Qin et al., NAACL'24] | ||
| 4/10 | Large Language Models for Recommendation | [Li et al., KDD'23], [Hou et al., ECIR'24] | ||
| W14 | 4/13 | Information Retrieval for Science and Scientific Research | [Jin et al., ACL'24], [Zhang et al., EMNLP'23], [Zhang et al., WWW'25], [Zhang, ACL'25] | |
| 4/15 | Quiz 4 | - | ||
| 4/17 | Logistics for Project Presentations and Final Exam | - | ||
| W15 | 4/20 | Project Presentations (Zoom) | ||
| 4/20 | Homework 4 Due (Monday) | |||
| 4/22 | Project Presentations (Zoom) | |||
| 4/24 | Project Presentations (Zoom) | |||
| W16 | 4/27 | Project Presentations (Zoom) | ||
| 5/2 | Project Report Due (Saturday) | |||
| W17 | 5/4 | Final Exam | ||