Also, be able to do the kinds of work requested in all the homeworks.  (Original version by Marti Hearst and Ray Larson, modified for 2001 by Ray Larson)

• Define precision. Define recall. Define relevance. How are the three interrelated?

• Under what circumstances is high recall desirable? Under what circumstances is high precision?

• Using the formula for the F-measure given in class, show what the resulting precision/recall combination score would be for the following values of b and of P and R.

• What is the main purpose of TREC? How does it differ from earlier evaluation efforts?

• Describe the following information need in terms of a faceted Boolean query. What kinds of weighting algorithms can be applied to a faceted query like this?

``I would like to find articles about the effects of the passage of the independent investigator statute by Congress on how the U.S. president chooses an attorney general.''
 
• How/why doesn't the Bates berry-picking model fit with the standard information retrieval model?

• Search and retrieval is part of a larger process. Name some other components of that process.

• Draw and label a diagram that shows the major components of an IR system.

• What is the difference between a search engine that uses the vector space ranking algorithm on natural language queries and a system that uses Boolean queries?

• How might one implement the ``mandatory''  operator (i.e. the "+" operator in web search engines) in a ranking algorithm?

• What are the special features of the Cheshire II information access system?

• What is the purpose of the TileBars graphical user interface? What are its strengths and weaknesses?

• Why do different web search engines return different sets of documents for the same query?

• How does search on Yahoo differ from search on Altavista?