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Session 1658

Putting Information Retrieval Theory into Practice – A Web Search Engine Project for an Undergraduate Computer Science Elective Course Xiannong Meng Computer Science Department Bucknell University Lewisburg, PA 17837

Abstract

This paper describes a semester project for an undergraduate computer science senior elective course, CSCI 379 Computer Science Topics – Information Retrieval and Web Search, taught at Bucknell University in the fall semester of 2002. In this course, students working in groups developed a Web search engine using information retrieval theory. The project includes implementing a basic Web server which acts as the dispatcher, an indexing component which builds the inverted indexing system for search, a ranking component which ranks the documents based on term frequency (tf) and inverted document frequency (idf), a retrieval component which takes the user query and retrieves the documents based on the ranking, and an crawling component which collects documents from the Web. The project is very practical in that students have to build a complete system, yet it involves many theoretical aspects of the information retrieval, algebra, and probability. It is an ideal project for a senior level course which requires a combination of the knowledge students have learned in their college years.

1 Introduction The wide spread use of the Web brought increased interests to college undergraduate courses such as information retrieval and computer networks. Students in these courses learn the basic concepts of the Web, the information retrieval theory (IR) and the Internet. They hope to gain an understanding how the Internet and its applications work and practice basic programming skills needed to program the Internet related applications. Web search engines provide ideal case studies for such courses. Implementation of a successful Web search engine requires a combination of information retrieval theory and solid network programming skills. This paper describes a semester project for an undergraduate CS se- nior elective course, CSCI 379 Computer Science Topics – Information Retrieval and Web Search. In this course, students working in groups developed a functional Web search en- gine. The project includes implementing a basic Web server which acts as the dispatcher, an indexing component which builds the inverted indexing system for search, a ranking component which ranks the documents based on term frequency (tf) and inverted docu- ment frequency (idf), a retrieval component which takes the user query and retrieves the “Proceedings of the 2003 American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition Copyright c 2003, American Society for Engineering Education”

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Meng, X. (2003, June), Putting Information Retrieval Theory Into Practice Paper presented at 2003 Annual Conference, Nashville, Tennessee. 10.18260/1-2--12086