Information Retrieval - Course outline

M.L.I.Sc. 2.3 - Information Retrieval Systems
Unit 1 Information Systems: Types of Information systems – IRS, DBMS, MIS, DSS, QAS, Expert Systems. IRS - Purpose, Functions and Components. Features of IRS. Functional model of an IRS.

Unit 2 Indexing Systems: Indexing - Meaning, Purpose and Need. An overview of historical development in indexing. Pre-coordinate Indexing Vs. Post-coordinate indexing. Pre-coordinate Indexing Systems – brief outline of Chain procedure, POPSI, PRECIS and Keyword Indexing. Post-coordinate Indexing Systems – Uniterm Indexing. Citation Indexing – Meaning and importance, Different citation indexes: Shepard’s Citations, SCI, SSCI. Automatic Indexing – Techniques and Methods. Uncontrolled Vocabularies.

Unit 3 Vocabulary Control: Vocabulary control – Meaning and importance; Controlled Vs. Free text indexing; Vocabulary Control Tools – Subject heading Lists, Thesauri, Thesaurofacet, Classarus. Thesaurai - its purpose, structure and format, Thesaurus construction techniques.
Case Study of Control Vocabularies/Ontologies such BIOSIS, ERIC, LISA, MeSH.

Unit 4 Information Search Strategy and Retrieval Models: Types of queries. Search Strategy: its pre-requisites, pre-search interview, the nature of search strategy, types of search strategy. Types of searches. Query formulation and searching process - Boolean operators and Boolean query formulation, Venn diagrams, Truncation, Wild Card Operators, Nested searching, Proximity searching, Range searching, Best match searching. IR Models: Structural models – Swets model, Probabilistic retrieval model, the vector processing model, cognitive user model

Unit 5 Evaluation of IRS: Purpose; Evaluation criteria; Design of evaluation programmes; Steps of evaluation; Evaluation experiments: Overview of the Cranfield test, MEDLARS, the SMART Retrieval Experiment, The STAIRS project, TREC.