COMP9024: Assignment 2
Simple Graph structure-based Search Engine

[The specification may change. A notice on the class web page will be posted after each revision, so please check class notice board frequently.]

Change log:

Objectives

Admin

Marks 15 marks towards total course marks
Due 11pm Sunday 03 Feb 2019.
Late
Penalty
2 marks per day off the ceiling.
Last day to submit this assignment is 5pm Tuesday 05 Feb 2019, of course with late penalty.
Submit Read instructions in the "Submission" section below.

Aim

In this assignment, your task is to implement a simple search engine using the well known algorithm PageRank, simplified for this assignment, of course!. You should start by reading the wikipedia entries on the topic. Later I will also discuss these topics in the lecture.

The main focus of this assignment is to build a graph structure, calculate PageRanks and rank pages based one these values. You don't need to spend time crawling, collecting and parsing weblinks for this assignment. You will be provided with a collection of "web pages" with the required information for this assignment in a easy to use format. For example, each page has two sections,

Hint: You can assume that maximum length of a line would be 1000 characters. You need to use a dynamic data structure(s) to handle words in a file and across files, no need to know max words beforehand.

Example file url31.txt

    #start Section-1

    url2  url34  url1 url26
    url52 url21
    url74  url6 url82

    #end Section-1

    #start Section-2

    Mars has long been the subject of human interest. Early telescopic observations
    revealed color changes on the surface that were attributed to seasonal vegetation
    and apparent linear features were ascribed to intelligent design.

    #end Section-2
    

Your tasks in summary:

How to get started Hints and Sample files

Additional files

You can submit additional supporting files, *.c and *.h, for this assignment. For example, you may implement your graph adt in files graph.c and graph.h and submit these two files along with other required files as mentioned below.


Part-A: Calculate PageRanks

You need to write a program in the file pagerank.c that reads data from a given collection of pages in the file collection.txt and builds a graph structure using Adjacency Matrix or List Representation. Using the algorithm described below, calculate PageRank for every url in the file collection.txt. In this file, urls are separated by one or more spaces or/and new line character. Add suffix .txt to a url to obtain file name of the corresponding "web page". For example, file url24.txt contains the required information for url24.

Example file collection.txt

    url25   url31 url2
       url102   url78
    url32  url98 url33

Simplified PageRank Algorithm (for this assignment)

        PageRank(d, diffPR, maxIterations)

            Read "web pages" from the collection in file "collection.txt"
            and build a graph structure using Adjacency List Representation

            N = number of urls in the collection
            For each url pi in the collection
                
            End For

            iteration = 0;
            diff = diffPR;   // to enter the following loop

            While (iteration < maxIteration AND diff >= diffPR)
                iteration++;


                
                        where,
                            -  is a set containing links(urls) pointing to pi
                                    (ignore self-loops and parallel edges)
                            -  is out degree of 
                            -  corresponds to value of "iteration"
                                    


                

	     End While
    

Your program in pagerank.c will take three arguments (d - damping factor, diffPR - difference in PageRank sum, maxIterations - maximum iterations) and using the algorithm described in this section, calculate PageRank for every url.

For example,

    % pagerank 0.85  0.00001  1000
    

Your program should output a list of urls in descending order of PageRank values (use format string "%.7f") to a file named pagerankList.txt. The list should also include out degrees (number of out going links) for each url, along with its PageRank value. The values in the list should be comma separated. For example, pagerankList.txt may contain the following:

Example file pagerankList.txt

    url31, 3, 0.2623546
    url21, 1, 0.1843112
    url34, 6, 0.1576851
    url22, 4, 0.1520093
    url32, 6, 0.0925755
    url23, 4, 0.0776758
    url11, 3, 0.0733884
    

Sample Files for Part-A

You can download the following three sample files with expected pagerankList.txt files.

Use format string "%.7f" to output pagerank values. Please note that your pagerank values might be slightly different to that provided in these samples. This might be due to the way you carry out calculations. However, make sure that your pagerank values match to say first 6 decimal points to the expected values. For example, say an expected value is 0.1843112, your value could be 0.184311x where x could be any digit.

All the sample files were generated using the following command:

% pagerank  0.85  0.00001  1000

Part-B: Inverted Index

You need to write a program in the file named inverted.c that reads data from a given collection of pages in collection.txt and generates an "inverted index" that provides a sorted list (set) of urls for every word in a given collection of pages. Before inserting words in your index, you need to "normalise" words by,

In each sorted list (set), duplicate urls are not allowed. Your program should output this "inverted index" to a file named invertedIndex.txt. One line per word, words should be alphabetically ordered, using ascending order. Each list of urls (for a single word) should be alphabetically ordered, using ascending order.

Example file invertedIndex.txt

    design  url2 url25 url31 url61 
    mars  url101 url25 url31 
    vegetation  url31 url61
    

Note: for this part, in your output file, on each line, a word and urls must be separated by one (or more) spaces. The testing program will ignore additional spaces.

Part-C: Search Engine

Write a simple search engine in file searchPagerank.c that given search terms (words) as commandline arguments, finds pages with one or more search terms and outputs (to stdout) top 30 pages in descending order of number of search terms found and then within each group, descending order of PageRank. If number of matches are less than 30, output all of them.

Your program must use data available in two files invertedIndex.txt and pagerankList.txt, and must derive result from them. We will test this program independently to your solutions for "A" and "B".

Note: For this part,

Example:

    % searchPagerank  mars  design
    url31
    url25
    


Submission

Additional files: You can submit additional supporting files, *.c and *.h, for this assignment.

IMPORTANT: Make sure that your additional files (*.c) DO NOT have "main" function.

For example, you may implement your graph adt in files graph.c and graph.h and submit these two files along with other required files as mentioned below. However, make sure that these files do not have "main" function.

I explain below how we will test your submission, hopefully this will answer all of your questions.

You need to submit the following files, along with your supporting files (*.c and *.h):

Now say we want to mark your pagerank.c program. The auto marking program will take all your supporting files (other *.h and *.c) files, along with pagerank.c and execute the following command to generate executable file say called pagerank. Note that the other two files from the above list (inverted.c and searchPagerank.c) will be removed from the dir:

% gcc -Wall -lm -Werror *.c  -o pagerank

So we will not use your Makefile (if any). The above command will generate object files from your supporting files and the file to be tested (say pagerank.c), links these object files and generates executable file, say pagerank in the above example. Again, please make sure that you DO NOT have main function in your supporting files (other *.c files you submit).

We will use similar approach to generate other two executables (for inverted.c and searchPagerank.c).

How to Submit

Go to the following submission page, select the tab named "Make Submission", and follow the instructions. The submission system will try to compile each required file, and report the outcome (ok or error). Please see the output, and correct any error. If you do not submit a file(s) for a task(s), it will report it as an error(s).


Plagiarism

You are allowed to use code from the course material (for example, available as part of the labs, lectures and tutorials). If you use code from the course material, please clearly acknowledge it by including a comment(s) in your file. If you have questions about the assignment, ask your tutor.

Your program must be entirely your own work. Plagiarism detection software compares all submissions pairwise (including submissions for similar projects in previous years, if applicable) and serious penalties will be applied, particularly in the case of repeat offences.

Do not copy from others; do not allow anyone to see your code, not even after the deadline

Please refer to the on-line sources to help you understand what plagiarism is and how it is dealt with at UNSW:

Before submitting any work you should read and understand the sub section named Plagiarism in the course outline. We regard unacknowledged copying of material, in whole or part, as an extremely serious offence. For further information, see the course outline.


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