Processamento e Recuperação de Informação

The teacher Rui Henriques is really good. He records the classes and posts them online and explains really well. I almost never looked at the slides, the classes are enough for both the project and the exam.

The contents of the course are super interesting. It focuses on how documents for a Retrieval System like Google are stored, indexed and retrieved. It also talks about concepts like LLMs, Web Crawlers and RAG.

The project is really open-ended and, even tho is a bit extensive for the time we had to do it, it's good to learn how to apply the concepts we talk about in the theoretical...

This year the course was taught by Professor Flávio Martins. Unfortunately, he didn’t seem very well prepared. The course felt somewhat disorganized: one of the MAPs and even a project deadline had to be postponed because the project statement wasn’t ready on time.

That said, the syllabus itself is quite interesting if you enjoy NLP and information retrieval. It starts with the basics, such as boolean retrieval, preprocessing techniques, and classic models like TF-IDF and BM25. You also cover evaluation metrics like nDCG. These topics form the basis of the first project.

In the second...

Professor did not teach well, could not teach everything planned for the theorectical, labs were bad with little information and teacher very confused, some exercises important for the exam. Exam had exercises about things that were not lectured nor existed in past exams. Teacher could not set nor keep dates for project release/deliveries, added an oral defence to the project and there wasn't the possibility of doing the second exam in july, had to pass in MAPs or first Exam which was not clear. First MAP very different structure from second, first gave more importance to written exercises,...

Tomás Lopes

I didn’t like this course. Several factors came together that made PRI a really terrible choice:

• This year we had a new Professor, Rui Henriques — which would typically be a good thing. However, information retrieval isn’t his area at all, and PRI is a course with way, way more theory to cover than something like AASMA. His teaching style just doesn’t fit a course like PRI, so the classes ended up being very boring....