Objectives

From the Course Objectives a key point is the objective to: critique, contrast, compare, and evaluate the efficiency, effectiveness, and utility of commercially available and research prototype systems for IS&R. We can operationalize this in terms of considering the MARIAN, WATERS and WAIS systems. We can also look at the fundamental issues in this regard, involving data and files structures and their coupling with algorithms: inverted vs. document files, dictionaries with nearest neighbors, accumulators for document similarities vs. pruning methods, etc.

Another objective calls for students to: read and understand research contributions ... . The SALT75b reference was a research article when written, and gives a flavor of the interaction of theory and experimentation in this field. The text chapters are more like review articles, summarizing the history, and trying to organize the results given in many papers.

In summary, this Unit has the following objectives, for students to be able to:

1. effectively use the WAIS system for locating databases and carrying out searches, using natural language queries and relevance feedback;

2. know how to make relevance judgments for IR research, and do that for the MARIAN system, characterized by its very short document descriptions;

3. explain the key ideas behind the various ranking and feedback algorithms that aim to make these processes efficient; and

4. compare and contrast the various ranking and feedback methods regarding retrieval effectiveness, user effort required, storage requirements, and efficiency.