Processing content-oriented XPath queries

  • Authors:

  • Börkur Sigurbjörnsson;Jaap Kamps;Maarten de Rijke

  • Affiliations:

  • University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands;University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands;University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the thirteenth ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

Document-centric XML collections contain text-rich documents, marked up with XML tags that add lightweight semantics to the text. Querying such collections calls for a hybrid query language: the text-rich nature of the documents suggests a content-oriented (IR) approach, while the mark-up allows users to add structural constraints to their IR queries. Hybrid queries tend to be more expressive, which should lead---in principle---to better retrieval performance. In practice, the processing of these hybrid queries within an IR systems turns out to be far from trivial, because a delicate balance between structural and content information needs to be sought. We propose an approach to processing such hybrid content-and-structure queries that decomposes a query into multiple content-only queries whose results are then combined in ways determined by the structural constraints of the original query. We evaluate our methods using the INEX 2003 test-suite, and show (1) that effective ways of processing of content-oriented XPath queries are non-trivial, (2) that there are differences in the effectiveness for different topics types, but (3) that with appropriate processing methods retrieval effectiveness can improve.