CS6200 10X1 Term Project

Created: Tue 11 May 2010
Last modified:

Assigned: Tue 15 Jun, 2010
Proposals Due: Fri 18 Jun, 2010
Presentations Held: Wed/Thu 23-24 Jun, 2010
Projects Due: Fri 25 Jun, 2010

Required of Graduate Students Only

Your term project consists of either a third project or an in-class presentation on an IR topic.

You must submit a short (one-paragraph) proposal acknowledging and/or describing the project or presentation topic you have chosen by the "proposal due" date listed above. (E-mail or hardcopy is fine.)

Projects

Your task is to complete an IR project similar is scope to the projects already assigned in this course. One such example project is to build a metasearch system as described in the following Metasearch Project document.

Examples of other projects include:

implementing and testing a clustering algorithm,
implementing and testing collaborative filtering system,
implementing and testing a compression utility,
and so on...

Any reasonable implementation topic relevant to the course is acceptable. The metasearch project described above is most well specified; if you are interested in another topic (such as those listed above), please contact me so that I can provide guidance and resources.

Presentations

Your task is to investigate an area of Information Retrieval research that you find interesting. You will read 2-5 research papers from (mostly) refereed publications in order to get a sense of what has been done. You may end up covering fewer research papers. Your in-class presentation should run approximately 15 minutes and should highlight the interesting or exciting parts of the work you explored.

Guidelines

An excellent presentation will make it clear that you have looked at the few papers in sufficient depth to have noticed something interesting and intriguing. The summary of the work will be succint and demonstrate that you've thought about it sufficiently to distill it to its essence. Slides for the presentation will be well executed and easy to read. The presentation itself will be energetic and fun (this will not count as heavily as it might since not everyone is comfortable--let alone energetic and fun--in front of an audience). The audience should be left anxious to read your paper(s).

More toughts on the content of the presentation and paper are listed below.

Source material

You should be using primarily refereed papers (e.g., conferences and journals). Here are some useful sources and how to get ahold of them:

Proceedings of the SIGIR , CIKM and ECIR conferences.
ACM Transactions on Information Systems journal.
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Information Processing and Management.

You may get some of your information from the TREC proceedings. However, TREC proceedings are not refereed and often are rather sparse in the details presented. If you use a TREC paper, you should find some refereed version of the results to confirm that what was presented is accurate. Here is the TREC homepage off of which you can find the proceedings.

Many papers are available via the ACM Digital Library, Google Scholar, and CiteSeer.

Topics

Here are some topics that could make good papers, roughly grouped into affinity areas. Some have been discussed in class, meaning that you'd have a better starting point. Others would be new to you if you don't have any additional source of information. You should not feel entirely constrained by this list, though most people will end up choosing from it.

Evaluation
- Techniques for finding relevant documents more quickly using the pooled approach
- Comparison of evaluation measures, their stability, how they scale
- The TREC robust track (trying to get rid of or recognize poorly-performing queries)
Question answering
- Methods for finding passages that might contain an answer
- Description of some of the better QA systems
- Dialogue in question answering
Other sources of data
- Retrieving spoken documents (speech recognizer output) (an old TREC track)
- Retrieving documents (an old TREC track)
- Web retrieval (a TREC track)
- Terabyte-scale retrieval (a TREC track)
- Genomics retrieval (a TREC track)
Multimedia indexing and retrieval
- Direct retrieval of images and/or video
- Retrieval via surrounding or descriptive text
- Retrieval via image/video annotation
Summarization
- Summarizing a single document
- Summarizing multiple documents
- Headline-type summaries
- Summarizing in other languages
Cross-language and multi-lingual retrieval
- Research coming out of CLEF (European Cross-Language Evaluation Forum)
  - Interactive CLIR
- Details on some techniques
- Sparse language issues (recent special issues in ACM Transactions on Asian Language Information Processing)
Other interesting stuff not touched on in class
- Semantic Web
- Human interaction issues
- Structured documents (XML)
- String search algorithms
More in-depth look at some aspect of some topic from class

Topics are first-come, first-served. Two (or more) people can have the same topic only if they specify in advance how they will be specializing their presentations.

Presentation

The goal of the presentation is to find and talk about something that is intriguing. It could be something that runs counter to something said in class, or that pushes an idea from class in an interesting way. It could be something that was never mentioned in class, but that is pretty cool and slick. It could be an outrageous claim that, now that you're most of the way through the course, you don't believe. It could be an open problem that you think would be exciting to tackle.

Remember that this is something you think is intriguing. Find some way to make it clear that it is intriguing, so your audience understands why you picked it. What makes it exciting?

You have about 15 to 20 minutes for a presentation. In that time, you'll need to provide just enough background for your tidbit to make sense, and to present your tidbit. A good rule of thumb is 1 to 3 minutes per slide, so you shouldn't expect to use many more than 10 to 15 slides to fit within the time available. You should, of course, practice your presentation to ensure that it is roughly 15 to 20 minutes.

DO NOT PLAGIARIZE. If you copy any text from any other source, regardless of whether the source is one that you used, of whether you include it in your bibliography, of whether it is published, of whether it is readily available on the Web, of anything--if you copy any such text, you must put it in quotation marks and/or indent it and indicate exactly where it came from, including a complete citation and a page number.