This talk will cover the basics of information retrieval (IR) and its evaluation. It will cover the core ideas behind most IR systems and provide intuition for how they work and what their limitations are. The talk will also include a discussion of how IR systems are evaluated by researchers.

James Allan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Computer Science at UMass, Amherst. He is also Associate Director of the Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR), one of the top IR research labs in the world. Prof. Allan's research interests focus on event-based organization of broadcast news, including tracking, clustering, visualization, and summarization.