CS276B / SYMBSYS 239J / LING 239J
Text Information Retrieval, Mining, and Exploitation
Winter 2003

Christopher Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze

Grading Information

General Grading Policy:

Midterm Exam	20%
Final Exam	40%
Project	40% (divided as follows)
Part 1A	8%
Part 1B	8%
Part 2	24%

Midterm Grading Details

The midterm is a one hour exam held during classtime on Thursday, February 6, 2003. It is open book, open notes. The only things disallowed are networked devices. It will cover the following topics:

Document Clustering
- Agglomerative clustering
- Hierarchical clustering
- k-means
- Selecting the number of clusters
- Term vs. document space
- Feature selection
- Clustering to speed up scoring
- Labeling clusters
- Clustering as dimensionality reduction
- Evaluation of text clustering
- Link-based clustering
- Enumerative clustering/trawling

Text Classification
- Methods
- Generative models
- Maximum likelihood
- Naive Bayes
- Multivariate binomial vs. multinomial
- Feature selection via mutual information
- Conditional independence assumption
- Relation to information extraction
- Feature selection
- Evaluating categorization methods

Information Extraction
- Hand coded wrappers
- Wrapper induction: LR, HLRT, BWI wrappers
- Named entity recognition
- FSA-based methods: FASTUS
- Learning information extractors
- HMMs for information extraction
- Web wrappers and agents

Project 1A Grading Details

Project part 1A submissions are due by Monday, January 27, 2003 at 11:59 pm. Your submission should include:

A subpackage of the citeunseen package which contains all of your source code (*.java files). This code should compile using ant, and if we need special libraries, please make sure they are posted in the /afs/ir/class/cs276b/lib/ directory, so that they are automatically added to the classpath.
You should have a class in your package called Main that implements the java.lang.Runnable interface, and that has a main(String[]) function allowing command line execution. If arguments are required, please error check the arguments and output appropriate usage information.
Appropriate documentation in javadoc format. It is especially important that you include a package.html file in your top-level package to provide an overview of the usage, the design, and the rationale behind design decisions.
A proposed name for our collective citation indexing system (have fun with this!).

We will grade your project submissions using the following criteria:

Performance: The performance of your program on real data. We will consider the portion of the data (or cases, as appropriate) that it is able to process reasonably, the quality of the processing that it performs, and the gracefulness with which it handles errors (e.g., your code should not exit or corrupt data structures).
Design: The thoughtfulness and elegance with which your code was designed. This includes the algorithms and data structures that you chose to use and the internal structure of the code (nice use of OOP programming principles, for example).
Writeup: We will read your package-level documentation in the package.html file to understand the techniques that you tried and the reasoning behind your design decisions.
Intelligibility: We will consider the overall intelligibility of your code. Your score will suffer if we have difficulty understanding the functioning of your code by reading the documentation and the code itself. Make sure you do extensive commenting at the package, class, method, and field level, in javadoc format. Also, some inline comments may be necessary.
Initiative: We will assess the degree to which you demonstrated initiative in researching and implementing your procedure. It will help if you find a paper, algorithm, or dataset that we are unaware of.

Project 1B Grading Details

Project part 1B submissions are due by Tuesday, February 11, 2003 at 11:59 pm. Your submission should include:

A subpackage of the citeunseen package which contains all of your source code (*.java files). This code should compile using ant, and if we need special libraries, please make sure they are posted in the /afs/ir/class/cs276b/lib/ directory, so that they are automatically added to the classpath.
You should have a class in your package called Main that implements the java.lang.Runnable interface, and that has a main(String[]) function allowing command line execution. It should be able to run with no arguments.
All parameters should be stored in the properties.dat file located in the class data directory, and accessed using the Properties and PropertiesManager classes
Your program should be hooked up to the correct database, tables, and file system directories
Appropriate documentation in javadoc format. It is especially important that you include a package.html file in your top-level package to provide an overview of the usage, the design, and the rationale behind design decisions.