Language Models for XML Element Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper we describe our participation in the INEX 2009 ad-hoc track. We participated in all four retrieval tasks (thorough, focused, relevant-in-context, best-in-context) and report initial findings based on a single set of measure for all tasks. In this first participation, we test two ideas: (1) evaluate the performance of standard IR engines used in full document retrieval and XML element retrieval; (2) investigate if document structure can lead to more accurate and focused retrieval result. We find: 1) the full document retrieval outperforms the XML element retrieval using language model based on Dirichlet priors; 2) the element relevance score itself can be used to remove overlapping element results effectively.