Xapian devel - Mar 2012 - About the projects of "Ranking" for GSoC 2012

Hello,
I am Mohiuddin Abdul Qader, final year student from dept of CSE in
Bangladesh University of Engineering & Technology(BUET).
My major was artificial intelligence & i finished my course on Machine
Learning and Pattern Recognition this year. I am very keen to contribute in
open source community. I have just completed my thesis on  'Location Based
Structured Web Search'. For the purpose of research, I developed a search
engine in BUET domain using vector space model
implementing tf-idf weighting scheme. I have showed that our search engine
gives better result for many queries than google.
I have to plans to work on other weighting schemes to see if those works
better.

I have been following Xapian for couple of days. I am very keen on the
projects of 'Ranking' criteria. "Project: Weighting Schemes"
is a very interesting project for me, as i have already developed a search
engine using tf-idf scheme and i would really like to implement tfidf or
DivergenceFromRandomness on xapian. Will it sufficient to be a GSoC project?

Another project was very interesting 'Learning to Rank'. I went through
some study about this project & find out some papers from Microsoft
Research regarding implementation of learning to Rank using Gradient
Descent Algorithm (Neural Network). I recently worked on a project on
Bengali character recognition using a Neural Network. Here the Neural
Network was build from scratch by me in Java. So it will be exciting to
work on implementing a neural network & apply learning to rank algorithm to
see the results.
Can you give any suggestion about what further study I have to do? Also as
both projects are very interesting which project should i give priority to
be accepted as a GSoC project?

Thanks in advance.

-- 
Mohiuddin Abdul Qader
CSE, BUET '06
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL:
<http://lists.xapian.org/pipermail/xapian-devel/attachments/20120327/0beec7b8/attachment.html>

On Tue, Mar 27, 2012 at 11:19:54PM +0600, Mohiuddin Abdul Qader
wrote:
> I have been following Xapian for couple of days. I am very keen on the
> projects of 'Ranking' criteria. "Project: Weighting
Schemes"
> is a very interesting project for me, as i have already developed a search
> engine using tf-idf scheme and i would really like to implement tfidf or
> DivergenceFromRandomness on xapian. Will it sufficient to be a GSoC
project?
I think just tackling one family or the other wouldn't be enough,
especially since you have prior experience with implementing weighting
schemes (albeit in other software).  You'll also find one much easier
with the experience of doing the other, and looking at performance of
various schemes would be less extra work for additional schemes.
> Another project was very interesting 'Learning to Rank'. I went
through
> some study about this project & find out some papers from Microsoft
> Research regarding implementation of learning to Rank using Gradient
> Descent Algorithm (Neural Network). I recently worked on a project on
> Bengali character recognition using a Neural Network. Here the Neural
> Network was build from scratch by me in Java. So it will be exciting to
> work on implementing a neural network & apply learning to rank
algorithm to
> see the results.
If there's an existing suitable neural network library (which it seems
there probably is - FANN has been mentioned before) it would be better
to use that rather than put a lot of effort into implementing our own
which we would then have to maintain.
> Can you give any suggestion about what further study I have to do? Also as
> both projects are very interesting which project should i give priority to
> be accepted as a GSoC project?
Parth knows more about this than I do, but there's been some discussion
of the LTR project on the list already, so reading the recent archives
should give you some more useful information.

I'd suggest going for whichever project you find more interesting - we
have had similar interest in both so far this year I think.

Cheers,
    Olly