CS246 Tentative Paper Reading List

This is a tentative class schedule and may change as the class progresses. Note that the access to the papers are password protected for copyright reasons.

  1. Week 1: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, WWW 1998
  2. Week 2: A vector space model for automatic indexing by G. Salton, A. Wong, and C. S. Yang, CACM 1975
  3. Week 3: Authoritative sources in a hyperlinked environment by Jon Kleinberg, JACM 1999
  4. Week 4: Indexing by Latent Semantic Analysis by Scott Deerwester et al., Journal of the American Society for Information Science 1990
  5. Week 5: Probabilistic Topic Models by Mark Steyvers and Tom Griffiths, Latent Sematic Analysis: A Road to Meaning, 2007
  6. Week 6: From RankNet to LambdaRank to LambdaMART: An Overview by Christopher J.C. Burges, Microsoft Research Technical Report, 2010
  7. Week 7: Optimizing Search Engines using Clickthrough Data by Thorsten Joachims, KDD 2002
  8. Week 8: Synchronizing a database to Improve Freshness by Junghoo Cho and Hector Garcia-Molina, SIGMOD 2000
  9. Week 9: Impact of Web Search Engines on Page Popularity by Junghoo Cho and Sourashis Roy, WWW 2004
  10. Week 10: To help students prepare for final, no paper summaries are due in Week 10

Paper Summaries

A brief summary of any assigned paper is due by the end of the week at 11PM Sunday. Please note that the primary purpose of the summary requirement is to ensure that every student spends time to read the paper, not to test a student’s writing ability.

Each summary will be graded as “Excellent”, “Good”, or “Bad”. Most summaries, say around 90%, will get “Good” grade unless they are written extremely poorly/well. If you get “Good” grades for all your summaries you will get the full score for the paper summary part of this class.

Here are a few examples of excellent summaries in case they are helpful:

Please note that do not need to write many words to get a good grade. Each summary must consists of at most 3 paragraphs: one paragraph that summarizes the main content of the paper in your own words and one or two paragraphs with your comments and criticisms on the good and the bad of the paper. Optionally you may include questions that you may have had while you were reading the paper. Generally speaking, about 500 words are enough for writing an excellent summary. Just make sure that your summary clearly shows your efforts in reading and understanding the assigned paper. Please note that certain cases will guarantee a poor grade, including but not limited to: copying the abstract verbatim, cut-and-pasting a few sentences from the paper, writing itself not making much sense, or failing to reflect the contents of the paper, etc.