Information Retrieval (SIGIR)

Information is an area of computer science that studies how to store and retrieve human knowledge in the form of natural language text and multimedia. Interestingly, IR is both an area of active research and also forms a solid mathematical foundation for much of advanced artificial intelligence research.

SIG activities will be centered around reading from textbooks and research papers, experimening with benchmark datasets and IR toolkits and participating in evaluation and competitive conferences.

To give our SIGIR members the broadest possible exposure, several relevant faculty members and Ph.D. students will help in guiding students along. Faculty include:

At SoC, IR research is done by both the Multimedia and Artificial Intelligence groups. Please see the CHIME lab and the media technologies home pages.

Sample activities of the SIG

Second Year Students, Semester 1 (as part of CS2305S) Pick up basic knowledge on IR by reading chapters of Baeza-Yates & Ribero-Neato book entitled Modern Information Retrieval. Lecture materials from certain introductory courses worldwide will be reviewed as well.

Students will form a reading group that meets every two weeks to discuss reading. Students take turns being discussion leader. Faculty and senior Ph.D. students will help will clear up misunderstandings and ambiguities.

Second Year Students, Semester 2 (as part of CS2306S): Students will learn to use open source information retrieval software such as MG and Lucene to complement their theoretical knowledge with practical ones. Students will work in teams to create niche search engines for student groups and SoC projects.

Third Year Students

  • Students form reading group and learn more advanced topics such as:
    • passage retrieval
    • question answering
    • text summarization
  • enrol in related area coursework such as
    • artificial intelligence
    • hypermedia technologies.
  • do research as part of their Undergraduate Research Opportunity Programme (UROP) project.
  • organize invited talks by experts.
  • organize training sessions for their juniors.
  • organize information and recruitment sessions for their SIG.

Fourth Year Students
  • Students form reading group and read conference and journal papers.
  • enrol in more advanced AI coursework, such as:
    • machine learning
    • natural language processing
    • knowledge representation and expert systems
  • do research as part of their Honours Year Project (HYP).
  • organize invited talks by experts.
  • organize training sessions for their juniors.
  • organize information and recruitment sessions for their SIG.