Practice Final Questions for SIMS 202 Fall 1997

This questions are to help guide you in your studying. We do not guarantee that they cover completely the set of topics or kinds of questions that will appear on the final exam.

Also, be able to do the kinds of work requested in all the homeworks, including Homework 7, the practice homework.

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.

b = .5, P = .6, R = .9

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.''

Consider the following combination of search attributes. Name a kind of real-life search situation that it would describe. (See Belkin et al. paper).

Method: scan. Goal: learning.

How/why doesn't the Bates berry-picking model fit with the standard information retrieval model?

Name the search modes discussed in the O'Day and Jeffries paper. What kinds of triggers did they find caused transitions from one search strategy to another?

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 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?

What is the difference between a controlled vocabulary and author-defined keywords?

What are the advantages of search on controlled vocabularies over uncontrolled vocabularies?
What are the advantages of search on uncontrolled vocabularies over controlled vocabularies?
How can these differences be reconciled?

How does search on Yahoo differ from search on Altavista?

What is the main mechanism used by the Cat-a-Cone user interface to combine search over free text and metadata?