LBSC 708A Final Exam						June 17, 1999

This exam is open book, open notes, and you may even use the Internet
to search for information if you like.  You may not receive help from
any person, however.  You have three hours to complete the exam, but
each question can be answered adequately in one hour so you should not
need all of that time.  Do not spend more than half of your time on
one question!  I will be available to answer questions about this exam
if you have any.

1. Answer ONE of the following questions:

a.  (Retrospective Retrieval) You have been asked to design a new
system for retrospective retrieval of document images from a
collection of old journal articles in English that have been scanned.
You are free to design any type of system that you feel will meet the
needs of professional researchers that wish to look for articles in
the old journals. Explain each stage of the system model, including
which features it will index, how the user will pose queries, how it
will detect the documents that should be displayed to the user, how it
will display that set of documents to the user in a way that
facilitates selection, how users can examine individual documents, and
how it will deliver documents desired by the user to them.

b.  (Information Filtering) In the coming years, people at ISTIC may
receive more email than they have time to read.  Some of this email
will be in English and some will be in Chinese.  You have been asked
to design a system that can be used to help users cope with this flood
of email by building one or more ranked lists for the user each
morning that will allow them to examine their most important email
first.  Explain each stage of the system model for the system that you
will build, including which features it will index, how the system
will obtain and update each user's profile, how it will detect the
documents that should be displayed to the user highest in the list,
how it will display that set of documents to the user in a way that
facilitates selection, how users can examine individual documents, and
how it will deliver documents desired by the user to them.

2.  Answer ONE of the following questions:

a.  (Overall System Evaluation) You have been asked to compare the
performance of an existing Boolean text retrieval system with a new
ranked retrieval system based on the vector space model that your
organization is considering purchasing.  Both systems handle the same
documents (which are represented as electronic text), and both allow
the user to search free text.  State which aspects of each system will
be important to evaluate, and explain how you would evaluate each in a
way that would allow the results of your evaluation of each system to
be meaningfully compared.

b.  (TREC-like Evaluation) You have been asked to design a TREC-like
evaluation for ranked retrieval systems that are designed to find
photographic images.  Your evaluation will be expected to evaluate
only the detection component of each system, and it is important that
people be able to easily replicate the evaluation so that they can
tell whether changes that they make have improved their system.  State
the measure (or measures) of effectiveness that you will adopt, and
explain their strengths and weaknesses.  Then explain how you will
construct the queries, the collection of images, and the relevance
assessments that you will use, and how the measure(s) of effectiveness
that you chose will be computed.

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