Xapian devel - Mar 2013 - Project: Learning To Rank

Hello everyone,

I am Abhiroop, 3rd year engineering student from BITS Pilani, India. I was
going through the idea list of Xapian Search Engine Library and the idea
Learning to Rank interested me.

I am not very well conversant with C++. However I have done a lot of
development work in Java and Python. And i have done a project in C# too.

Currently I am working on 2 projects:

1.Distributed Data Mining for large astronomical data involving Hadoop
Distributed File System, Map Reduce and applying decision tree and non
linear principal component analysis to fetch the relevant data.

2.A bookmark based link recommender which recommends the user relevant
links based on the web page classification done on the bookmarks made by
the users. I am principally planning to use Naive Bayes classification or
SVM or neural network approach,checking their success for various queries
and then choosing the best.

Both the above mentioned projects are being done in Java. In the second
project I am ranking among the links which various users using have
visited. Principally i am planning to use an ontological approach by
classifying the links into various class labels and then ranking within the
individual class using AKTiveRank Algorithm
.

I feel I can contribute to the project however most of the codes that I
have written are in Java or Python. Is it essential to use C++ to
contribute to this project? I can send snippets of code I have written till
now if you are interested.

Regards,
Abhiroop Sarkar
3rd year. Undergraduate
M.Sc Mathematics and B.E. Electronics and Instrumentation
BITS Pilani, Goa Campus.
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On Mon, Mar 11, 2013 at 05:51:03PM +0530, Abhiroop Sarkar
wrote:
> I feel I can contribute to the project however most of the codes that I
> have written are in Java or Python. Is it essential to use C++ to
> contribute to this project?
Yes - it would be extending the existing Learning to Rank Xapian module, 
which is written in C++.

Trying to write something like this in a mixture of languages isn't
likely to be very satisfactory, and throwing away or translating all the
existing work doesn't seem a good use of resources.  Even if we were
starting it from scratch, we'd likely prefer C++.

Cheers,
    Olly