The source code is written in Python 2.

The code is self-documented, but you will find useful info in the docs/ folder.

To launch the program : simply launch main.py, after having installed the dependecies (see below). You can change the config parameters in the config.ini file.

For this program to run, you will need to install several libraries.

Run pip install BTree configparser dill from command line (you need to install pip first)

You will also need to unzip the CACM collection, in sources folder. Your folder must look like:

├── search-engine-assignment
└── sources
    ├── README
    ├── cacm.all
    ├── cite.info
    ├── common_words
    ├── qrels.text
    └── query.text

All parameters are written in the config.ini file. You may change them to your needs. If a parameter is not valid, it is silently defaulted (default is vectorial search on normal tf-idf with cosine similarity). After changing the parameters, you need to quit the program if you were running it. Both main.py and mesures.py rely on this config file.

Just run measures.py to get a whole set of measures for your current config. Warning : this will give strange results for boolean search, since the queries are not in NDF. See docs/measures.md for more details.

The reverse index has been implemented on CACM database only. It can support various types of ponderation, and is saved in the data/ folder for future uses. See docs/reverse_index_construction.md for more details.

Boolean search must be typed as NDF, WITHOUT parenthesis, such as : "term1 AND term2 AND NOT term3 OR term1 AND term4". AND/OR/NOT can be lowercase. You cannot search for term AND/OR/NOT, as they are key values. They are nonrelevant anyway and automatically removed from both query and documents.

Results are ranked according to the Extended Boolean Search ranking (see docs/search.md for more infos).

A vectorial search can be virtually anything. Results are ranked by their similarity. See docs/search.md for more details.

In the same way, a probabilistic query can be anything. Results are ranked by their RSV. See docs/search.md for more details.