Using structural relationships for focused XML retrieval

Abstract

In focused XML retrieval, information retrieval systems have to find out which are the most appropriate retrieval units and return only these to the user, avoiding overlapping elements in the result lists. This paper studies structural relationships between elements and explains how they can be used to produce a better ranking for a focused task. We analise relevance judgements to find the most useful links between elements and show how a retrieval model can be adapted to incorporate this information. Experiments on the INEX 2005 test collection show that the structural relationships improve retrieval effectiveness considerably. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.