Andrew
Trotman and Mounia Lalmas
Structural hints
in XML-retrieval queries can be used to specify both the granularity of the
search result (the target element) and where in a document to search (support
elements). These hints might be interpreted either strictly or vaguely, but
does it matter if an XML search engine interprets these in one way and the user
in another? The performance of all runs submitted to INEX 2005 content and
structure (CAS) tasks were measured for each of four different interpretations
of CAS. Runs that perform well for one interpretation of target elements do so
regardless of the interpreta-tion of support elements; but how to interpret the
target element does matter. This suggests that to perform well on all CAS
queries it is necessary to know how the target structure specification should
be interpreted. We extend the NEXI query language to include this, and
hypothesize that using this will increase the overall performance of search
engines.