[Xapian-devel] GSoC Term Weighting project

[Olly Betts]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 10:06:24AM +0800, Chris Hokamp wrote:
> I'm a graduate student in Linguistics and Computer Science in the US, and
> I'm planning to propose a project to Xapian for GSoC that would implement
> and evaluate a variety of weighting schemes and ranking methods, allowing
> users to select different combinations. I have pretty thorough knowledge IR
> weighting and ranking, and I'm good in Java and Perl, and functional in
> Python, but my knowledge of C++ is limited to a single undergraduate
> course, so I wanted to ask the development community how essential good C++
> skills would be if I want to realistically complete this project.

I think this project isn't going to require hard-core C++ skills.
Provided you're happy to learn more C++ on the job, I don't think it
would be a big issue, and it sounds like you'd be on top of the theory
side, and that you can write code.

> Of course, the reason I want to do this is to improve my programming skills
> and contribute to Xapian, but I don't want to be unrealistic about my
> prospects. Any advice or feedback you can provide on this would be great.

We're putting together a page of advice for people wanting to apply:

http://trac.xapian.org/wiki/GSoC2012

Cheers,
    Olly