LBSC 708A
Information Retrieval Systems
Fall 2000
Study Guide for Quiz 1

All Students

Be familiar with the concepts from the lecture view graphs including.

Definitions

• TREC, TDT, MUC
• Co-design
• Relevance vs. utility
• Relevance feedback
• Power law
• proximity operators
• Degree of separation (on the Web)
• Stop list
• Text data mining
• Stemming
• Page Rank
• Inverted index

Conceptual Issues

• Information vs. data
• What is retrieval?
• How can stages of retrieval be decomposed?
• User's conception of search process
• Rough size of the Web
• Caching and mirroring Web sites
• Hubs and Beacons
• Cluster hypothesis
• Ranked retrieval
• Web characterization, building a Web index
• Dimensionality reduction
• LSI as a model of cognition.
• Singlular Valued Decomposition (SVD)

Basic Equations and Algorithms: Be able to work simple problems with the following

• Zipf's law
• Boolean Retrieval, truth tables, term X document matrix
• Coordiantion number
• Vector Model - TF/IDF
• Cosine distance measure
• Basic Evaluation Calculations: Precision/Recall

Algorithms Students

Be able to work more complex problems from the set above

• Law of Surfing
• B+tree (be able to build one)
• Data structures in a Web search engine (Google reading)