Welcome to the Wiki page of the course Search Engines, WS 2009 / 2010. Lecturer: Hannah Bast. Tutorials: Marjan Celikik. Course web page: click here.

Here are PDFs of the slides of the lectures so far: Lecture 1, Lecture 2, Lecture 3, Lecture 4.

Here are .lpd files of the recordings of the lectures so far (except Lecture 2, where we had problems with the microphone): Lecture 1 Lecture 3 Lecture 4.

Here are PDFs of the exercise sheets so far: Exercise Sheet 1, Exercise Sheet 2, Exercise Sheet 3, Exercise Sheet 4.

Here are your solutions and comments on the previous exercise sheets: Solutions and Comments 1, Solutions and Comments 2, Solutions and Comments 3

Exercise Sheet 3

The recordings of all lectures are now available, see above. Lecture 2 is missing because we had technical problems there. To play the recordings (it's .lpd files) you need the Lecturnity Player. You can download the player for free here.

Here are the rules for the exercises as explained in Lecture 2.

Here you can upload your solutions for Exercise Sheet 4.

Questions or comments below this line, most recent on top please

Hi Marius + all: For Exercise 4, an inverted list of size m with doc ids from the range [1..n] is simply a sorted list of m numbers from the range [1..n]. I leave it to you, whether your lists potentially contain duplicates (as in 3, 5, 5, 8, 12, ...) or whether you generate them in a way that they don't contain duplicates (as in 3, 5, 8, 17, ...). It doesn't really matter for the exercise whether your list has duplicated or not. In any case, consider simple flat lists like in the two examples I gave (and like all the examples I gave in this and past lectures), not lists of lists or anything. Hannah 15Nov09 1:12am

@Mirko: Sure, but an inverted list is a list of words where the Doc-IDs are attached to each words in which the words occur. So for Example: If word no. 5 occurs in Doc1, Doc2 and Doc3 and word no. 2 occurs in Doc5, the list would look like: 5 -> Doc1, Doc2, Doc3; 2 -> Doc5. Or am I mistaken? My question then is, how long should these attached lists be in average case? I mean, one could imagine that we got 1mil. documents over 3 words, so these lists could get very large...

EDIT: Oh ok. Now, I see your point. It's not an index, it's a list. Okay. So, what is an inverted list with Doc-IDs, then?

EDIT EDIT: And to your question, Mirko, take a look at http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/93. Especially at Comment no. 2. Maybe this helps... I think, Java supports StreamWriters/Readers that are able to write/read bytes. Marius 11/14/2009 08:46pm

EDIT EDIT EDIT: Sorry, me again. Well, I bothered Wikipedia which redirects from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_list to Inverted Index. So it seems to me, this is being used as a synonym. Actually, I think I'm confused enough, now. I'll better wait for any responses... Marius 11/14/2009 9:08 pm

@ Marius: i think we are supposed to generate one inverted list of size m, with doc ids from 1..n (therefore n>=m, because no duplicates?).

Now a question from my side: ex.4, programming the compression in java, is there any good tutorial about how to handle the bit-stuff? (otherwise, i think, it would cost me too much time..) Mirko 14Nov09, 19:18

Hi, do you have any suggestions what the best numbers for m and n in exercise 4 should look like? Or are we supposed to mess around a bit with ints and longs? And: How long should the list of documents in the inverted index be? Marius 14Nov09 6:40pm

And just to clarify what a single-cycle permutation is. Here is an example for an array of size 5 with a permutation that is a single cycle: 5 4 1 3 2. Why single cycle? Well, A[1] = 5, A[5] = 2, A[2] = 4, A[4] = 3, A[3] = 1. (My indices in this example are 1,...,5 and not 0,...,4.) Here is an example of a permutation with three cycles: 2 1 4 3 5. The first cycle is A[1] = 2, A[2] =1. The second cycle is A[3] = 4, A[4] = 3. The third cycle is A[5] = 5. Hannah 12Nov09 8:04pm

Hi Daniel + all, I don't quite understand your question and your example (if your array is 1 5 3 4 2, why is A[1] = 3?). In case you refer to the requirement of the exercise that the permutation consists only of a single cycle. That is because your code should go over each element exactly once (it should, of course, stop after n iterations, where n is the size of the array). If your permutation has more than one cycle, it is hard to achieve that. Also note that for both (1) and (2), the sum of the array values should be sum_i=1,...,n i = n * (n+1) / 2. Hannah 12Nov09 7:54pm

Hi, I just looked at the new exercise sheet 4, in exercise 1 we should generate a permutation and sum the resulting array up, am I wrong or doesn't iterating method two iterate throw the whole array in every situation. for ex.: n= 5 permutation: 1 5 3 4 2, then A[1] = 3, A[A[1]]= A[3] = 1, A[1] = 3 ... Daniel 12Nov09 19:44pm