Three approaches to content-and-structure XML retrieval are analysed in this paper: first by using Zettair, a full-text information retrieval system; second by using eXist, a native XML database, and third by using a hybrid XML retrieval system that uses eXist to produce the final answers from likely relevant articles retrieved by Zettair. INEX 2003 content-and-structure topics can be classified in two categories: the first retrieving full articles as final answers, and the second retrieving more specific elements within articles as final answers. We show that for both topic categories our initial hybrid system improves the retrieval effectiveness of a native XML database. For ranking the final answer elements, we propose and evaluate a novel retrieval model that utilises the structural relationships between the answer elements of a native XML database and retrieves Coherent Retrieval Elements. The final results of our experiments show that when the XML retrieval task focusses on highly relevant elements our hybrid XML retrieval system with the Coherent Retrieval Elements module is 1.8 times more effective than Zettair and 3 times more effective than eXist, and yields an effective content-and-structure XML retrieval.
For the purpose of ranking the resulting answers of XML retrieval topics, @cite_2 extend the probabilistic ranking model by incorporating the notion of structural roles'', which can be determined manually from the document schema. However, the term frequencies are measured only for the structural elements belonging to a particular role, without taking into account the entire context where all these elements belong in the document hierarchy. XRank @cite_3 and XSearch @cite_5 furthermore aim at producing effective ranked results for XML queries. XRank generally focuses on hyperlinked XML documents, while XSearch retrieves answers comprising semantically related nodes. However, since the structure of IEEE XML documents in the INEX document collection does not typically meet the above requirements, neither of them (without some modifications) could be used in a straightforward fashion with the CAS retrieval task.
@cite_5 @cite_3 @cite_2
1973828215 1965667542 2061172803 2137523786 2099691420 2099015201 2082729696 1975998118 2071778852 2037098674 2141957180 2098423524 2045825058 2085030399 1487445520 2159545104 2007675602 2113112851 2128475980 2123229843
We consider the problem of efficiently producing ranked results for keyword search queries over hyperlinked XML documents. Evaluating keyword search queries over hierarchical XML documents, as opposed to (conceptually) flat HTML documents, introduces many new challenges. First, XML keyword search queries do not always return entire documents, but can return deeply nested XML elements that contain the desired keywords. Second, the nested structure of XML implies that the notion of ranking is no longer at the granularity of a document, but at the granularity of an XML element. Finally, the notion of keyword proximity is more complex in the hierarchical XML data model. In this paper, we present the XRANK system that is designed to handle these novel features of XML keyword search. Our experimental results show that XRANK offers both space and performance benefits when compared with existing approaches. An interesting feature of XRANK is that it naturally generalizes a hyperlink based HTML search engine such as Google. XRANK can thus be used to query a mix of HTML and XML documents. A novel probabilistic retrieval model is presented. It forms a basis to interpret the TF-IDF term weights as making relevance decisions. It simulates the local relevance decision-making for every location of a document, and combines all of these “local” relevance decisions as the “document-wide” relevance decision for the document. The significance of interpreting TF-IDF in this way is the potential to: (1) establish a unifying perspective about information retrieval as relevance decision-making; and (2) develop advanced TF-IDF-related term weights for future elaborate retrieval models. Our novel retrieval model is simplified to a basic ranking formula that directly corresponds to the TF-IDF term weights. In general, we show that the term-frequency factor of the ranking formula can be rendered into different term-frequency factors of existing retrieval systems. In the basic ranking formula, the remaining quantity - log p(rvt ∈ d) is interpreted as the probability of randomly picking a nonrelevant usage (denoted by r) of term t. Mathematically, we show that this quantity can be approximated by the inverse document-frequency (IDF). Empirically, we show that this quantity is related to IDF, using four reference TREC ad hoc retrieval data collections. Background We present a probabilistic topic-based model for content similarity called pmra that underlies the related article search feature in PubMed. Whether or not a document is about a particular topic is computed from term frequencies, modeled as Poisson distributions. Unlike previous probabilistic retrieval models, we do not attempt to estimate relevance–but rather our focus is "relatedness", the probability that a user would want to examine a particular document given known interest in another. We also describe a novel technique for estimating parameters that does not require human relevance judgments; instead, the process is based on the existence of MeSH ® in MEDLINE ®. This paper presents a novel engine, coined TopX, for efficient ranked retrieval of XML documents over semistructured but nonschematic data collections. The algorithm follows the paradigm of threshold algorithms for top-k query processing with a focus on inexpensive sequential accesses to index lists and only a few judiciously scheduled random accesses. The difficulties in applying the existing top-k algorithms to XML data lie in 1) the need to consider scores for XML elements while aggregating them at the document level, 2) the combination of vague content conditions with XML path conditions, 3) the need to relax query conditions if too few results satisfy all conditions, and 4) the selectivity estimation for both content and structure conditions and their impact on evaluation strategies. TopX addresses these issues by precomputing score and path information in an appropriately designed index structure, by largely avoiding or postponing the evaluation of expensive path conditions so as to preserve the sequential access pattern on index lists, and by selectively scheduling random accesses when they are cost-beneficial. In addition, TopX can compute approximate top-k results using probabilistic score estimators, thus speeding up queries with a small and controllable loss in retrieval precision. This paper proposes a new approach to querying collections of structured textual information such as SGML XML documents. Knowledge about the structure of documents is an additional resource that should be exploited during retrieval since the semantics of the different textual objects can be used to specify an information need much more precisely. However the traditional probabilistic retrieval model lacks the ability to handle structural information. We define a new retrieval function based on the probabilistic model which overcomes this drawback. The presented query language allows the assignment of structural roles to individual terms. The efficient evaluation of queries in this framework requires appropriate index structures. We design text and structure indexes and show how their information is combined during evaluation. The implementation supports additional functionalities such as a table of contents for browsing. First evaluation results show the feasibility of the approach on collections of unstructured documents. Inspired by the great success of information retrieval (IR) style keyword search on the web, keyword search on XML has emerged recently. The difference between text database and XML database results in three new challenges: (1) Identify the user search intention, i.e. identify the XML node types that user wants to search for and search via. (2) Resolve keyword ambiguity problems: a keyword can appear as both a tag name and a text value of some node; a keyword can appear as the text values of different XML node types and carry different meanings. (3) As the search results are sub-trees of the XML document, new scoring function is needed to estimate its relevance to a given query. However, existing methods cannot resolve these challenges, thus return low result quality in term of query relevance. In this paper, we propose an IR-style approach which basically utilizes the statistics of underlying XML data to address these challenges. We first propose specific guidelines that a search engine should meet in both search intention identification and relevance oriented ranking for search results. Then based on these guidelines, we design novel formulae to identify the search for nodes and search via nodes of a query, and present a novel XML TF*IDF ranking strategy to rank the individual matches of all possible search intentions. Lastly, the proposed techniques are implemented in an XML keyword search engine called XReal, and extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach. This paper reports on a novel technique for literature indexing and searching in a mechanized library system. The notion of relevance is taken as the key concept in the theory of information retrieval and a comparative concept of relevance is explicated in terms of the theory of probability. The resulting technique called “Probabilistic Indexing,” allows a computing machine, given a request for information, to make a statistical inference and derive a number (called the “relevance number”) for each document, which is a measure of the probability that the document will satisfy the given request. The result of a search is an ordered list of those documents which satisfy the request ranked according to their probable relevance. The paper goes on to show that whereas in a conventional library system the cross-referencing (“see” and “see also”) is based solely on the “semantical closeness” between index terms, statistical measures of closeness between index terms can be defined and computed. Thus, given an arbitrary request consisting of one (or many) index term(s), a machine can elaborate on it to increase the probability of selecting relevant documents that would not otherwise have been selected. Finally, the paper suggests an interpretation of the whole library problem as one where the request is considered as a clue on the basis of which the library system makes a concatenated statistical inference in order to provide as an output an ordered list of those documents which most probably satisfy the information needs of the user. Abstract One of the most important problems in information retrieval is determining the order of documents in the answer returned to the user. Many methods and algorithms for document ordering have been proposed. The method introduced in this paper differs from them especially in that it uses a probabilistic model of a document set. In this model documents are regarded as states of a Markov chain, where transition probabilities are directly proportional to similarities between documents. Steady-state probabilities reflect similarities of particular documents to the whole answer set. If documents are ordered according to these probabilities, at the top of a list there will be documents that are the best representatives of the set, and at the bottom those which are the worst representatives. The method was tested against databases INSPEC and Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library (NCSTRL). Test results are positive. Values of the Kendall rank correlation coefficient indicate high similarity between rankings generated by the proposed method and rankings produced by experts. Results are comparable with rankings generated by the vector model using standard weighting schema tf·idf. The paper considers a wireless information system, wherein various pieces of information represented in XML are broadcast via wireless channels, and mobile clients access the broadcast stream using energy-restricted portable devices. In this paper, we propose a wireless XML streaming method designed to provide energy-efficient access to a wireless stream. We construct two hierarchical structures to represent the XML data and their index information, called the XML data tree and XML index tree, respectively. The wireless XML stream is generated by traversing these two structures with some replications. We design three data index replication strategies (PP, TT, and TP) in the streaming method. We compare the proposed streaming method with a [email protected]?ve method called the (1,X) method both analytically and experimentally. Also, based on our analysis results, we determine the optimal method of replication. Traditionally, information retrieval systems aim to maximize thenumber of relevant documents returned to a user within some windowof the top. For that goal, the probability ranking principle, whichranks documents in decreasing order of probability of relevance, isprovably optimal. However, there are many scenarios in which thatranking does not optimize for the users information need. Oneexample is when the user would be satisfied with some limitednumber of relevant documents, rather than needing all relevantdocuments. We show that in such a scenario, an attempt to returnmany relevant documents can actually reduce the chances of findingany relevant documents. We consider a number of information retrieval metrics from theliterature, including the rank of the first relevant result, the no metric that penalizes a system only for retrieving no relevantresults near the top, and the diversity of retrieved results whenqueries have multiple interpretations. We observe that given aprobabilistic model of relevance, it is appropriate to rank so asto directly optimize these metrics in expectation. While doing somay be computationally intractable, we show that a simple greedyoptimization algorithm that approximately optimizes the givenobjectives produces rankings for TREC queries that outperform thestandard approach based on the probability ranking principle. Given a set @math of @math strings of total length @math , our task is to report the "most relevant"strings for a given query pattern @math . This involves somewhat more advanced query functionality than the usual pattern matching, as some notion of "most relevant" is involved. In information retrieval literature, this task is best achieved by using inverted indexes. However, inverted indexes work only for some predefined set of patterns. In the pattern matching community, the most popular pattern-matching data structures are suffix trees and suffix arrays. However, a typical suffix tree search involves going through all the occurrences of the pattern over the entire string collection, which might be a lot more than the required relevant documents. The first formal framework to study such kind of retrieval problems was given by [Muthukrishnan, 2002]. He considered two metrics for relevance: frequency and proximity. He took a threshold-based approach on these metrics and gave data structures taking @math words of space. We study this problem in a slightly different framework of reporting the top @math most relevant documents (in sorted order) under similar and more general relevance metrics. Our framework gives linear space data structure with optimal query times for arbitrary score functions. As a corollary, it improves the space utilization for the problems in [Muthukrishnan, 2002] while maintaining optimal query performance. We also develop compressed variants of these data structures for several specific relevance metrics. We address the problem of querying XML data over a P2P network. In P2P networks, the allowed kinds of queries are usually exact-match queries over file names. We discuss the extensions needed to deal with XML data and XPath queries. A single peer can hold a whole document or a partial complete fragment of the latter. Each XML fragment document is identified by a distinct path expression, which is encoded in a distributed hash table. Our framework differs from content-based routing mechanisms, biased towards finding the most relevant peers holding the data. We perform fragments placement and enable fragments lookup by solely exploiting few path expressions stored on each peer. By taking advantage of quasi-zero replication of global catalogs, our system supports fast full and partial XPath querying. To this purpose, we have extended the Chord simulator and performed an experimental evaluation of our approach. In this paper, we present a probabilistic method that can improve the efficiency of document classification when applied to structured documents. The analysis of the structure of a document is the starting point of document classification. Our method is designed to augment other classification schemes and complement pre-filtering information extraction procedures to reduce uncertainties. To this end, a probabilistic distribution on the structure of XML documents is introduced. We show how to parameterise existing learning methods to describe the structure distribution efficiently. The learned distribution is then used to predict the classes of unseen documents. Novelty detection making use of the structure-based distribution function is also discussed. Demonstration on model documents and on Internet XML documents are presented. This paper describes a simple way of adapting the BM25 ranking formula to deal with structured documents. In the past it has been common to compute scores for the individual fields (e.g. title and body) independently and then combine these scores (typically linearly) to arrive at a final score for the document. We highlight how this approach can lead to poor performance by breaking the carefully constructed non-linear saturation of term frequency in the BM25 function. We propose a much more intuitive alternative which weights term frequencies before the non-linear term frequency saturation function is applied. In this scheme, a structured document with a title weight of two is mapped to an unstructured document with the title content repeated twice. This more verbose unstructured document is then ranked in the usual way. We demonstrate the advantages of this method with experiments on Reuters Vol1 and the TREC dotGov collection. With the recent dramatic increase in electronic access to documents, text categorization—the task of assigning topics to a given document—has moved to the center of the information sciences and knowledge management. This article uses the structure that is present in the semantic space of topics in order to improve performance in text categorization: according to their meaning, topics can be grouped together into “meta-topics”, e.g., gold, silver, and copper are all met als. The proposed architecture matches the hierarchical structure of the topic space, as opposed to a flat model that ignores the structure. It accommodates both single and multiple topic assignments for each document. Its probabilistic interpretation allows its predictions to be combined in a principled way with information from other sources. The first level of the architecture predicts the probabilities of the meta-topic groups. This allows the individual models for each topic on the second level to focus on finer discriminations within the group. Evaluating the performance of a two-level implementation on the Reuters-22173 testbed of newswire articles shows the most significant improvement for rare classes. Ranking a set of retrieved documents according to their relevance to a query is a popular problem in information retrieval. Methods that learn ranking functions are difficult to optimize, as ranking performance is typically judged by metrics that are not smooth. In this paper we propose a new listwise approach to learning to rank. Our method creates a conditional probability distribution over rankings assigned to documents for a given query, which permits gradient ascent optimization of the expected value of some performance measure. The rank probabilities take the form of a Boltzmann distribution, based on an energy function that depends on a scoring function composed of individual and pairwise potentials. Including pairwise potentials is a novel contribution, allowing the model to encode regularities in the relative scores of documents; existing models assign scores at test time based only on individual documents, with no pairwise constraints between documents. Experimental results on the LETOR3.0 data set show that our method out-performs existing learning approaches to ranking. The increasing diffusion of XML languages for the encoding of domain-specific multimedia information raises the need for new information retrieval models that can fully exploit structural information. An XML language specifically designed for music like MX allows queries to be made directly on the thematic material. The main advantage of such a system is that it can handle symbolic, notational, and audio objects at the same time through a multilayered structure. On the model side, common music information retrieval methods do not take into account the inner structure of melodic themes and the metric relationships between notes. In this article we deal with two main topics: a novel architecture based on a new XML language for music and a new model of melodic themes based on graph theory. This model takes advantage of particular graph invariants that can be linked to melodic themes as metadata in order to characterize all their possible modifications through specific transformations and that can be exploited in filtering algorithms. We provide a similarity function and show through an evaluation stage how it improves existing methods, particularly in the case of same-structured themes. XSEarch, a semantic search engine for XML, is presented. XSEarch has a simple query language, suitable for a naive user. It returns semantically related document fragments that satisfy the user's query. Query answers are ranked using extended information-retrieval techniques and are generated in an order similar to the ranking. Advanced indexing techniques were developed to facilitate efficient implementation of XSEarch. The performance of the different techniques as well as the recall and the precision were measured experimentally. These experiments indicate that XSEarch is efficient, scalable and ranks quality results highly. An important facility to aid keyword search on XML data is suggesting alternative queries when user queries contain typographical errors. Query suggestion thus can improve users' search experience by avoiding returning empty result or results of poor qualities. In this paper, we study the problem of effectively and efficiently providing quality query suggestions for keyword queries on an XML document. We illustrate certain biases in previous work and propose a principled and general framework, XClean, based on the state-of-the-art language model. Compared with previous methods, XClean can accommodate different error models and XML keyword query semantics without losing rigor. Algorithms have been developed that compute the top-k suggestions efficiently. We performed an extensive experiment study using two large-scale real datasets. The experiment results demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods. Although the presence of a schema enables many optimizations for operations on XML documents, recent studies have shown that many XML documents in practice either do not refer to a schema, or refer to a syntactically incorrect one. It is therefore of utmost importance to provide tools and techniques that can automatically generate schemas from sets of sample documents. While previous work in this area has mostly focused on the inference of Document Type Definitions (DTDs for short), we will consider the inference of XML Schema Definitions (XSDs for short) --- the increasingly popular schema formalism that is turning DTDs obsolete. In contrast to DTDs where the content model of an element depends only on the element's name, the content model in an XSD can also depend on the context in which the element is used. Hence, while the inference of DTDs basically reduces to the inference of regular expressions from sets of sample strings, the inference of XSDs also entails identifying from a corpus of sample documents the contexts in which elements bear different content models. Since a seminal result by Gold implies that no inference algorithm can learn the complete class of XSDs from positive examples only, we focus on a class of XSDs that captures most XSDs occurring in practice. For this class, we provide a theoretically complete algorithm that always infers the correct XSD when a sufficiently large corpus of XML documents is available. In addition, we present a variant of this algorithm that works well on real-world (and therefore incomplete) data sets.