Week 1Intro, Search Engine Architecture, Text Analysis
Official weekly topics for Week 1: - Lecture: Intro, Search Engine Architecture, Text Analysis - Introduction, Motivation and Logistic. Architecture of a Search Engine, key components of study across this course. Zipf's Law, Stemming, Stopwording. Indexing techniques and processing, including data structures. Learning outcomes: L01, L04, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 2Offline Evaluation
Official weekly topics for Week 2: - Lecture: Offline Evaluation - Offline evaluation methodology and evaluation frameworks, set-based and rank-based evaluation measures, statistical significance testing, parameter tuning. Learning outcomes: L01, L04, L05, L06 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 3Retrieval Models 1
Official weekly topics for Week 3: - Lecture: Retrieval Models 1 - Types of Retrieval models, Lexical-based models based on term frequency, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency, BM25, QLM. Learning outcomes: L01, L03, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 4Retrieval Models 2
Official weekly topics for Week 4: - Lecture: Retrieval Models 2 - Encoder and Decoder, Pre-trained language models, Transformers Learning outcomes: L01, L03, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 5Retrieval Models 3
Official weekly topics for Week 5: - Lecture: Retrieval Models 3 - Lexical-based Retrieval models with Learned term weight; TILDE, SPLADE Learning outcomes: L01, L03, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 6Retrieval Models 4
Official weekly topics for Week 6: - Lecture: Retrieval Models 4 - Embedding-based Retrieval models; RepBERT, ANCE, DPR, Contriver, COLBERT, Repllama; Learning outcomes: L03, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 7Reranking Models 1
Official weekly topics for Week 7: - Lecture: Reranking Models 1 - Offline Learning to rank and Online Learning to rank: Exploit Implicit Signals, counterfactual learning, online evaluation, click models Learning outcomes: L01, L03, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 8Reranking Models 2
Official weekly topics for Week 8: - Lecture: Reranking Models 2 - BERT-based Rerankers: MonoBERT, DuoBERT, LLM-based rerankers; Pointwise, PairWise, ListWise, SetWise Learning outcomes: L03, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 9Information Retrieval in the Age of LLMs
Official weekly topics for Week 9: - Lecture: Information Retrieval in the Age of LLMs - Retrieval-augmented Generation, Modern-based IR, LLM as a Judge for rankers, LLM-agent. Learning outcomes: L03, L05, L06 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 10Practicals
No separate week-by-week topic is publicly listed for Week 10; official repeated teaching activities are shown below: - Practical: Practicals - Practicals will provide an opportunity to further understand the concepts and techniques introduced in the lectures via examples, exercises, projects and problem-solving. Further concepts will be developed during these activities. There will be a mix of theory and hands-on activities. NOTE: these sessions start from week 1 and run until week 13 included. Learning outcomes: L02, L04, L05, L06 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 11Reranking Models 3: Diversity IR, Crawling and Link Analysis
Official weekly topics for Week 11: - Lecture: Reranking Models 3: Diversity IR, Crawling and Link Analysis - Ranking methods for diversity, ambiguity and redundancy. Methods for crawling Web pages; making use of link information: PageRank and HITS. Learning outcomes: L01, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 12Relevance Feedback and Fusion
Official weekly topics for Week 12: - Lecture: Relevance Feedback and Fusion - Methods based on query analysis, query expansion, relevance feedback. Fusion Methods Learning outcomes: L01, L05 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560
Week 13Index Compression
Official weekly topics for Week 13: - Lecture: Index Compression - Methods for compression: delta encoding, bit aligned codes, byte aligned codes Learning outcomes: L01, L05, L06 Official timetable activities: - Lecture | Tue 16:00 | 60 mins | 50-T103 Hawken Engineering Building, Learning Theatre - Practical | Wed 10:00 | 60 mins | 78-328 General Purpose South, Computer Lab Source: 2026 S2 UQ Course Profile - https://course-profiles.uq.edu.au/course-profiles/INFS7410-61073-7560