Greetings everyone.<div><br></div><div>My name is Chandan and I am a Junior student from National Institute of Technology, Nagpur, India. I have come to know that Xapian is participating in Google Summer of Code this year. I am interested in contributing to Xapian. I have gone through the project ideas list and found some of them really interesting. I am particularly interested in the project on <i><a href="http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoCProjectIdeas#WeightingSchemes">Weighting Schemes</a>.</i></div>
<div><i><br></i></div><div>I have seen the requirements for the project as well. I have advanced proficiency in programming in C++. I am really very good when it comes to linear algebra and probability. I am currently taking a course on Natural Language Processing, so I'll have some working familiarity with Information Retrieval as well in around a month. Although, I don't have any previous experience in open source, I have some experience in embedded software development in C using GNU tool chain. I was fascinated by Xapian's work and am really interested in the <i>Weighting Schemes</i> project. Currently, I am doing literature review on some weighting schemes other than BM25. At present, I am studying the Divergence from Randomness family.</div>
<div>It would be of great help, if someone at Xapian could help me get started. In particular, I would like to know in more detail about Xapian's expectations from this project and what really would make a great proposal for it.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thanks!</div><div><br></div><div>Regards,</div><div><a href="https://sites.google.com/site/cksvnit/">Chandan</a></div>