XML Information Retrieval Mounia Lalmas University of Glasgow
[email protected] Abstract Nowadays, increasingly, documents are marked-up using XML, the format stan- dard for structured documents. In contrast to HTML, which is mainly layout- oriented, XML follows the fundamental concept of separating the logical structure of a document from its layout. This document logical structure can be exploited to allow a focused access to documents, where the aim is to return the most relevant fragments within documents as answers to queries, instead of whole documents. This article describes approaches developed to query, represent, and rank XML fragments. Keywords: XML, structured document, logical structure, element, focused retrieval, query language, representation strategy, ranking strategy, information retrieval 1 Introduction Documents can be structured or unstructured. Unstructured documents have no (or very little) fixed pre-defined format, whereas structured documents are usually orga- nized according to a fixed pre-defined structure. An example of a structured document is a book organized into chapters, each with sections made of paragraphs and so on. Nowadays, the most common way to format structured content is with the W3C stan- dard for information repositories and exchanges, the eXtensible Mark-up Language (XML)1. Much of the content available on the web is formatted in HTML. Although HTML imposes some structure on a web content, this structure is mainly for presentation pur- poses and carries little meaning. In contrast, XML is used to provide meaning about the stored content. More precisely, in the context of text documents, with which this article is concerned, XML is used to specify the logical, or tree, structure of documents, in which separate document parts (e.g.