Project 0 for CS 371R:
Intelligent Information Retrieval and Web Search


Due: Sept 15, 2011


Project 0 will NOT be graded, and is entirely optional. It is just an exercise to walk you through the trace-collection and submission procedure. The sole purpose of Project 0 is to smooth out any glitches with Java environment setting, trace-collecting or submitting. If you submit Project 0 and have any problems on the way, the TA can help you with it.

The TA will help people with problems regarding Project 0 until the submission deadline. After the submission deadline for Project 0, it will be your responsibility to make sure that you know how to:

  1. Set up the Java environment correctly
  2. Collect traces
  3. Submit the required files

Project 0

As discussed in class, a basic system for vector-space retrieval (VSR) is available in /u/mooney/ir-code/ir/vsr/. See the Javadoc for this system. Use the main method for InvertedIndex to index a set of documents and then process queries.

You can use the web pages in /u/mooney/ir-code/corpora/yahoo-science/ as a set of test documents. This corpus contains 897 pages, 299 random samples each from the Yahoo indices for biology, physics, and chemistry.

See the sample trace of using the system. Open a Firefox browser before you run the code in order to have selected documents displayed in the browser.

Your task

Setup your Java environment (see info at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mooney/ir-course/java-info.html) , index the document collection at /u/mooney/ir-code/corpora/yahoo-science/, give the queries "fuel cell" and "human genome". Collect the trace using the "script" Unix utility. Submit the trace file using the "turnin" command (see info at http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/mooney/ir-course/proj-submit-info.html )

If you prefer to work in Eclipse, there is also a brief guide on creating an Eclipse project from the class code.