Component ranking and automatic query refinement for XML retrieval

Abstract

Queries over XML documents challenge search engines to return the most relevant XML components that satisfy the query concepts. In a previous work we described a component ranking algorithm that performed relatively well in INEX'03. In this paper we show an improvement to that algorithm by introducing a document pivot that compensates for missing terms statistics in small components. Using this new algorithm we achieved improvements of 30%-50% in the Mean Average Precision over the previous algorithm. We then describe a general mechanism to apply known Query Refinement algorithms from traditional IR on top of this component ranking algorithm and demonstrate an example such algorithm that achieved top results in INEX'04. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.