Google Summer of Code 2011

Xapian was a mentoring organisation for ​GSoC in 2011. You can also see a summary of our involvement in other years.

Projects

We received many strong applications, but we only had four slots from Google to allocate. It wasn't easy to decide, but these are the projects we selected:

• Dai Youli: Chinese segmentation analysis

Using Chinese segmentation algorithm to improve the performance when Xapian processing large amount of Chinese text.

• Parth Gupta: Learning to Rank

This project aims to add a ranking function with supervised learning which will learn from learning algorithms like Support Vector Machines. The learnt [!learned :)] function can assign the scores to the documents for the particular query depending on the feature vectors for the documents from the first retrieval and would re-rank them. It also aims to make an infrastructure for Learning to Rank module in Xapian so that any new learning algorithm can easily be added to it.

• Nikita Smetanin: Spelling correction improvements

The aim of this project is to make a Xapian's spelling correction system faster and much more better. Currently, this system has simple correction rules but this project will make it significantly better. This project includes performance improvements, new fuzzy search algorithms, phonetic algorithms, more adjusting abilities, and some ranking improvements.

• Xiaona Han: Support Lua on Xapian

This project aims to support Lua on Xapian. Lua is a powerful, fast, lightweight, embeddable scripting language. It has been used in many industrial applications and games. So support for Lua could allow Xapian to be more widely used and more powerful. Also many Lua projects could benefit from such binding as they could use Xapian as a highly adaptable Search Engine library.