LBSC 708A/CMSC 828O Final Exam				May 18, 1998

You have 2 hours to complete this exam.  It is open book and open
notes - you may use anything except another person to complete the
exam.  Answer any TWO of the three questions (If you answer all three,
I will grade only the first two that I happen to read).  Each question
carries equal weight.  Please discuss each issue in the questions you
select, providing as much detail as time allows.  You may use a
computer or write your answers longhand in the exam books provided,
but the answers must be turned in on paper to guard against unreadable
disks.

1. (Design knowledge)  

You have been asked to design an information retrieval system to index
videotaped interviews in an oral history collection.  Will you use
manually assigned controlled vocabulary terms, some form of indexing
based on features that are automatically extracted from the
videotapes, or some combination of the the approaches?  Justify your
choice, explaining how each stage in the information retrieval system
model will work and what sorts of search strategies users will find
effective when using the system you have designed.  In constructing
your answer, please also explain why the alternative approach would
not be as good.  For example, if you chose manually assigned
controlled vocabulary indexing, explain why that is better than
indexing based on automatically extracted features, or if you chose
both, explain why that is better than either approach alone.

2. (Implementation knowledge)

You have been asked to implement an information retrieval system to
provide access to individual articles in an academic library's journal
collection.  Only journals that are available in character coded
electronic form will be included in this digital collection - other
journals will be maintained as paper copies that are cataloged using a
different system so you need not concern yourself with those details.
List the steps involved with creating and using the electronic journal
collection, beginning with selection of a system and ending with
evaluation of how well it is working.  In addition to describing the
tasks to be performed, please also consider this from the perspective
of explaining to your supervisor what skills and resources will be
needed for each step.

3. (Techniques knowledge)  

Describe the techniques used to evaluate information retrieval systems
and discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each approach.  Use an
example to illustrate the points that you make, and explain how you
would interpret the results of each evaluation technique.  Please
choose examples different from the one in question 2 if you answered
that question.

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