A flexible object-oriented system for teaching and learning structured IR

Teaching (Structured) Information Retrieval in a postgraduate programme in Computer Science could be a difficult task, but the situation get worse when IR is considered as a mere application of the fundamentals in the programme core. In this case, the (usual) necessity of explaining the basic IR concepts joined with the necessity of doing some experimentation with the model play against the (available) time in which the student might acquires the knowledge. In this paper we present a platform that could help the student to understand about what issues are specific to efficient Structured Information Retrieval in a Probabilistic Graphical Model postgraduate programme.