Web Search and Text Analysis

This subject has the following teaching availabilities in 2012:

120 hours.

One of the following:

None

None

433-460 Human Language Technology
433-467 Text and Document Management
433-660 Human Language Technology
433-667 Text and Document Management
433-476 Text and Document Management

For the purposes of considering request for Reasonable Adjustments under the Disability Standards for Education (Cwth 2005), and Students Experiencing Academic Disadvantage Policy, academic requirements for this subject are articulated in the Subject Description, Subject Objectives, Generic Skills and Assessment Requirements of this entry.The University is dedicated to provide support to those with special requirements. Further details on the Disability support scheme can be found at the Disability Liaison Unit Website:http://www.services.unimelb.edu.au/disability/

The web is a vast and expanding storehouse of semi-structured textual information. Accessing and processing this information is one of the major challenges of the information age. In this subject, students study the technologies behind search engines, spam filtering, plagiarism detection, information extraction, question answering and newly emerging fields of information engineering. Topics include: web indexing, query evaluation, probabilistic language modelling, document classification and filtering, grammar and spelling correction, topic detection, cross-language information retrieval, machine translation and summarisation.

On completion of this subject students should be able to:

• Articulate issues relevant to the efficient implementation of web search systems and information retrieval systems

• Apply information retrieval methodologies as they relate to textual data

• Apply symbolic and statistical natural language processing techniques in textual analysis tasks

• Develop and evaluate computational models of language

• Apply core information engineering technologies in the management and exploitation of online information

• Two collaborative and/or individual projects due around weeks 6 and 11 of semester expected to take about 36 hours (20% each)
• A research-oriented workshop presentation (10%)
• And an end-of-semester written examination not exceeding 3 hours (50%).

This subject is not available as a breadth subject.

On completion of this subject students should have the:

• Ability to undertake problem identification, formulation, and solution
• Ability to utilise a systems approach to complex problems and to design for operational performance
• Ability to manage information and documentation
• Capacity for creativity and innovation
• Ability to communicate effectively, with the engineering team and with the community at large