Information Retrieval (study) resources

If you're looking for a way of getting to know the background of IR, there's a plethora of options (online) available. From the classic book by Keith van Rijsbergen (1979), the upcoming IR book by Manning and Schuetze (who previously wrote the classic "Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing") to various lecture pages of IR courses taught around the world. For example, David Carmel's course page at Haifa, James Allen's course page at UMass, Jamie Callan's course page at CMU, or ofcourse the course taught by Maarten de Rijke (which is more general and centered around "internet information").

Robin's advice

Here's a nice post from Robin Aly (doing his PhD at the Univ. of Twente): http://robin-twente.blogspot.com/2008/02/lessons-learned.html

Lectures on "Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business"

This lecture series on search ran at UC Berkeley in fall 2005. Although some of the material may already be out of date and generally doesn't go very deep, it's still a good (broad) overview of topics related to search and provides insights from different perspectives. They got some people from industry and the videos of the lectures are good quality.

Here's the course schedule with links to individual lectures: http://www2.sims.berkeley.edu/courses/is141/f05/schedule.html

Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity & Grace

My thesis adviser insisted that I read this book and it turned out extremely helpful. Joseph Williams' "Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace" demystifies the process of writing clearly and provides exercises and ideas that help improve your writing no matter how well (or not) you write right now.

Focus of the book is the question of what makes a sentence easy or hard to read. Only a small part of the answer relates to grammatical correctness. The larger part of the book discusses ideas such as cohesion, coherence, and emphasis, how these can be assessed, and how sentences can be rewritten to communicate ideas clearly.

There are many editions of this book. At some point it was split up into three different books: "Style: (Ten) Lessons in Clarity and Grace", "Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace", and "Style: Toward Clarity and Grace". I have the fifth edition of the first one, which can be bought used on amazon.com or half.com. I'm not sure how the other two relate to this one.

IR datasets on the web

On behalf of Manos:

Dear ilps-ers,

I found a nice post listing a lot of Large DataSets available on the web:

http://www.datawrangling.com/some-datasets-available-on-the-web.html

There is also a joint initiative to build a list of large datasets which can be found at: http://theinfo.org

You may already have heard most of the datasets but I thought this may prove handy as they are listed altogether.

Manos

How to Write a Good Paper: Some Suggestions

This month Krysztof Apt from the Dutch Center for Mathematics and Computer Science (CWI) gave an interesting presentation on how to write a good article. The presentation is now available on our video seminar search engine, ISLA-TV. The direct link to the video is here.

The abstract of the talk:

In this talk I shall go in detail into the writing process of a scientific article. In particular, I shall provide some suggestions how to organize the article, in what order to write its parts, how to organize and break down the proofs, how to link the results together, and what pitfalls to avoid.

CiteULike and more

CiteULike is in my opinion probably one of the finest web based tools for doing research. We even have our own group page there, in which you'll find a very broad scope of interests. Another one of my favourites is Diigo, which is a best-of-breed combination of Google Notebook and del.icio.us. It does much the same things as del.icio.us, but with this tool you can also highlight and annotate parts of documents found on the web and keep notes regarding those snippets. These will be stored, such that when you visit the page again, the highlighted sections will immediately stand out. Using their browser plugin/toolbar, you can even simultaneously add links and tags to other tagging software (Simpy, Furl, del.icio.us, Yahoo!, and Connotea to name just a few) and automatically create links in your own local bookmarks folder.

SVN and iWork files

This post should be relevant for anyone who uses SVN to back up their Mac. I've been getting very frustrated recently with backing up my iWork files - specifically, research posters made with Apple's Pages application. The problem is that Pages deletes some important SVN files every time you save your document.

Luckily, a fellow PhD student from Germany had the same problem and has made a solution. I've tried it out on my MacBook, and it seems to work very well.

Mastering Your PhD

'Mastering Your PhD' by Gosling and Noordam is a very practical book about various issues you encounter as a PhD, like attending conferences, yearly reviews, and of course thesis writing. Most of the chapters in the book have now been published as articles on the Science Careers website. One of the authors is Dutch and the other is German, it's nice to see a somewhat European slant on things.

Here is a list of the articles published so far. Recommended!

• Starting Off on the Right Foot
• Getting the Most Out of Progress Reviews
• Mentors, Leadership, and Community
• Relating to Your Co-Workers' Personality Types
• Mastering Your PhD: Strength in Numbers
• Mastering Your PhD: Celebrate Your Success
• Mastering Your PhD: Science Papers that Shine
• Making the Most of a Conference
• Dealing With Setbacks
• Group Dynamics
• Setting Goals for Success
• Running in Place
• Giving a Great Presentation

Getting the most out of your publications

The "Careers" section of Science Magazine published an article on how to get the most out of your publications:
Maximizing Productivity and Recognition, Part 1: Publication, Citation, and Impact