Xml Retrieval

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

Documents usually have a content and a structure. The content refers to the text of the document, whereas the structure refers to how a document is logically organized. An increasingly common way to encode the structure is through the use of a mark-up language. Nowadays, the most widely used mark-up language for representing structure is the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML). XML can be used to provide a focused access to documents, i.e. returning XML elements, such as sections and paragraphs, instead of whole documents in response to a query. Such focused strategies are of particular benefit for information repositories containing long documents, or documents covering a wide variety of topics, where users are directed to the most relevant content within a document. The increased adoption of XML to represent a document structure requires the development of tools to effectively access documents marked-up in XML. This book provides a detailed description of query languages, indexing strategies, ranking algorithms, presentation scenarios developed to access XML documents. Major advances in XML retrieval were seen from 2002 as a result of INEX, the Initiative for Evaluation of XML Retrieval. INEX, also described in this book, provided test sets for evaluating XML retrieval effectiveness. Many of the developments and results described in this book were investigated within INEX. Table of Contents: Introduction / Basic XML Concepts / Historical Perspectives / Query Languages / Indexing Strategies / Ranking Strategies / Presentation Strategies / Evaluating XML Retrieval Effectiveness / Conclusions

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 4th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2005, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in November 2005. The book presents 41 revised full papers, organized in topical sections on methodology, multiple retrieval, ad-hoc retrieval, relevance feedback, natural language queries, and more heterogeneous retrieval, interactive retrieval, document mining, and multimedia retrieval.

The ultimate goal of many information access systems (e.g., digital libraries, the Web, intranets) is to provide the right content to their end-users. This content is increasingly a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, and is formatted according to the adopted –W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup L- guage (XML). Whereas many of today’s information access systems still treat do- ments as single large (text) blocks, XML offers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access thus providing more specific answers to user requests. Providing effective access to XML-based content is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. The aim of the INEX campaign (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval), which was set up at the beginning of 2002, is to establish infrastructures, XML test suites, and appropriate measurements for evaluating the performance of information retrieval systems that aim at giving effective access to XML content. More precisely, the goal of the INEX initiative is to provide means, in the form of a large XML test collection and appropriate scoring methods, for the evaluation of content-oriented XML retrieval systems.

In order to be effective for their users, information retrieval (IR) systems should be adapted to the specific needs of particular environments. The huge and growing array of types of information retrieval systems in use today is on display in Understanding Information Retrieval Systems: Management, Types, and Standards, which addresses over 20 typ

I write with pleasurethis forewordto the proceedings of the 7th workshopof the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval (INEX). The increased adoption of XML as the standard for representing a document structure has led to the development of retrieval systems that are aimed at e?ectively accessing XML documents. Providing e?ective access to large collections of XML documents is therefore a key issue for the success of these systems. INEX aims to provide the necessary methodological means and worldwide infrastructures for evaluating how good XML retrieval systems are. Since its launch in 2002, INEX has grown both in terms of number of p- ticipants and its coverage of the investigated retrieval tasks and scenarios. In 2002, INEX started with 49 registered participating organizations, whereas this number was more than 100 for 2008. In 2002, there was one main track, c- cerned with the ad hoc retrieval task, whereas in 2008, seven tracks in addition to the main ad hoc track were investigated, looking at various aspects of XML retrieval, from book search to entity ranking, including interaction aspects.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 30th annual European Conference on Information Retrieval Research, ECIR 2009, held in Toulouse, France in April 2009. The 42 revised full papers and 18 revised short papers presented together with the abstracts of 3 invited lectures and 25 poster papers were carefully reviewed and selected from 188 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on retrieval model, collaborative IR / filtering, learning, multimedia - metadata, expert search - advertising, evaluation, opinion detection, web IR, representation, clustering / categorization as well as distributed IR.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 6th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2007, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2007. The 37 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected for presentation at the workshop from 50 initial submissions. The papers are organized in an ad hoc track and 6 topical sections on book search, XML-mining, entity ranking, interactive, link-the-wiki, and multimedia.