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Finding Out About (FOA) Survey

UCB - SIMS202 (Fall 98)

To get a little extra credit, email your responses to this survey to Rik Belew, address below. He will send me a list of names of people who answered the survey.

Please be honest (but polite, of course); if you are nice for the sake of being nice only, that does not help him. If you'd rather send him your comments anonymously, email them to Alison Brandt (abrandt@sims) who will then forward them without a name to Belew. She will then tell me who sent survey responses to her.

Please complete this survey by December 9.

Rik Belew still has some time to do some revising before this goes to press, and is very interested in any and all reactions you might have to the draft of the FOA text you used in this class. He has written the questions below but wants you also to make any other responses that come to mind.

Simply reply to him at rik@cs.ucsd.edu in Email. He'd appreciate it if you could use the
Subject: SIMS202-FOA reactions.
When responding to these questions you can simply use the question number.

    Specific Questions

  1. What did you think of the RAVE assignment? (Assignment 5, in which you assigned relevance judgements).
    1. Did you have any problems doing the assignment?
    2. Did it make sense how this data fit into your final (precision/recall) evaluations?
  2. How "mathy" did you find FOA?
    1. Were there parts where you didn't understand the math?
    2. Was there any background math that you wish you had/should be considered a prerequisite?
    3. Were there parts where the math seemed irrelevant?
  3. In several cases FOA text overlapped with others of your readings. Can you say anything about which treatments you found easier/harder?
    1. How would you compare/contrast FOA-Chap2 with Frakes's chapter "Stemming Algorithms"?
    2. How would you compare/contrast FOA-Chap2 with Fox's chapter "Lexical Analaysis and Stoplists"?
    3. How would you compare/contrast FOA-Chap3 with Harman's chapter "Ranking Algorithms"?

    General questions

  4. What parts (chapters, sections) of the text did you like best (ie, find easist to understand, most engaging, ...)?
  5. What parts did you like least well (ie, find hardest to understand, most boring, ...)?
  6. Were there parts that you thought were in the wrong order (ie, that depended on material that was presented later, that would have made sense later, ...)?
  7. How did you find the AIT corpus? Was it a useful example?
  8. Any reactions to the code and data file formats?
  9. Any reactions to any of the exercises in the book? Did you attempt any of them?

Last updated Nov 18, 1998 MAH.