Xapian devel - Mar 2012 - GSoC Term Weighting project

Hi everyone,

I'm a graduate student in Linguistics and Computer Science in the US, and
I'm planning to propose a project to Xapian for GSoC that would implement
and evaluate a variety of weighting schemes and ranking methods, allowing
users to select different combinations. I have pretty thorough knowledge IR
weighting and ranking, and I'm good in Java and Perl, and functional in
Python, but my knowledge of C++ is limited to a single undergraduate
course, so I wanted to ask the development community how essential good C++
skills would be if I want to realistically complete this project.

Of course, the reason I want to do this is to improve my programming skills
and contribute to Xapian, but I don't want to be unrealistic about my
prospects. Any advice or feedback you can provide on this would be great.

Thanks
Chris
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On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:06:24AM +0800, Chris Hokamp
wrote:
> I'm a graduate student in Linguistics and Computer Science in the US,
and
> I'm planning to propose a project to Xapian for GSoC that would
implement
> and evaluate a variety of weighting schemes and ranking methods, allowing
> users to select different combinations. I have pretty thorough knowledge IR
> weighting and ranking, and I'm good in Java and Perl, and functional in
> Python, but my knowledge of C++ is limited to a single undergraduate
> course, so I wanted to ask the development community how essential good C++
> skills would be if I want to realistically complete this project.
I think this project isn't going to require hard-core C++ skills.
Provided you're happy to learn more C++ on the job, I don't think it
would be a big issue, and it sounds like you'd be on top of the theory
side, and that you can write code.
> Of course, the reason I want to do this is to improve my programming skills
> and contribute to Xapian, but I don't want to be unrealistic about my
> prospects. Any advice or feedback you can provide on this would be great.
We're putting together a page of advice for people wanting to apply:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC2012

Cheers,
    Olly