1. Discussion Class 7
User Requirements

2. Course Administration
No Office Hours: Thursday, October 17 or Tuesday October 22.
Guest Lecture: Tuesday, October 22. Carl Lagoze, Distributed information retrieval
Midterm Examination: Wednesday, October 23, Upson B17, 7:30 to 9:00. A sample examination and a discussion of the answers is on the web site.
The midterm and final examinations aim to reward regular attendance in class (including guest lectures) and careful reading for the discussion classes.

3. Discussion Classes Format: Question
Ask a member of the class to answer
Provide opportunity for others to comment
When answering:
Give your name. Make sure that the TA hears it.
Stand up
Speak clearly so that all the class can hear

4. Question 1: Distributed Information Retrieval
"The more general problems are locating the best databases to search in a distributed environment that may contain hundreds or even thousands of databases, and merging the results that come back from the distributed search."
(a) What is the problem?
(b) Is this a problem for web search services such as
Infoseek or Lycos? How do they handle it?

5. Question 2: Efficiency
(a) As computers get more powerful, the need for efficiency often diminishes. What is special about information retrieval?
(b) What aspects of efficiency would you consider especially critical in storage, processing, and memory utilization?
(c) What has changed in the seven years since this paper was written? What about the next seven years?

6. Question 3: Relevance Feedback
"These factors mean that traditional feedback techniques can be unpredictable in operational settings."
(a) What assumptions does relevance feedback make about user behavior?
(b) How is practical experience different?
(c) Is this a fundamental problem?

7. Question 4: Integrated Solutions
"The most important problem from the point of view of companies using and selling text-based systems is integration with other systems."
(a) Give examples of integration of information retrieval with other systems.
(b) What impact has the web had on this situation?
(c) What are the problems in integrating information retrieval into database systems?

8. Question 5: Magic
"One of the major causes of failures in IR systems is vocabulary mismatch."
(a) What has a thesaurus to do with this statement?
(b) What has latent semantic indexing to do with this statement?
(c) Are there problems with "magic"?

9. Question 6: Precision and Recall
Croft suggests that precision and recall may not be the only criteria in the usefulness of the results from information retrieval.
(a) What else does he consider important?
(b) What does this have to do with stemming?

10. Question 7: Multimedia retrieval
(a) What is the problem of multimedia retrieval?
(b) Why does Croft put it so low down his list (#8)?