Applying the divergence from randomness approach for content-only search in XML documents

Abstract

Content-only retrieval of XML documents deals with the problem of locating the smallest XML elements that satisfy the query. In this paper, we investigate the application of a specific language model for this task, namely Amati's approach of divergence from randomness. First, we investigate different ways for applying this model without modification by redefining the concept of an (atomic) document for the XML setting. However, this approach yields a retrieval quality lower than the best method known before. We improved the retrieval quality through extending the basic model by an additional factor that refers to the hierarchical structure of XML documents. © Springer-Verlag 2004.