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Result‐reconstruction method to return useful XML elements

Atsushi Keyaki (Graduate School of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan)
Kenji Hatano (Faculty of Culture and Information Science, Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan)
Jun Miyzaki (Graduate School of Information Science, Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Nara, Japan)

International Journal of Web Information Systems

ISSN: 1744-0084

Article publication date: 22 November 2011

171

Abstract

Purpose

Nowadays there are a large number of XML documents on the web. This means that information retrieval techniques for searching XML documents are very important and necessary for internet users. Moreover, it is often said that users of search engines want to browse only relevant content in each document. Therefore, an effective XML element search aims to produce only the relevant elements or portions of an XML document. Based on the demand by users, the purpose of this paper is to propose and evaluate a method for obtaining more accurate search results in XML search.

Design/methodology/approach

The existing approaches generate a ranked list in descending order of each XML element's relevance to a search query; however, these approaches often extract irrelevant XML elements and overlook more relevant elements. To address these problems, the authors' approach extracts the relevant XML elements by considering the size of the elements and the relationships between the elements. Next, the authors score the XML elements to generate a refined ranked list. For scoring, the authors rank high the XML elements that are the most relevant to the user's information needs. In particular, each XML element is scored using the statistics of its descendant and ancestor XML elements.

Findings

The experimental evaluations show that the proposed method outperforms BM25E, a conventional approach, which neither reconstructs XML elements nor uses descendant and ancestor statistics. As a result, the authors found that the accuracy of an XML element search can be improved by reconstructing the XML elements and emphasizing the informative ones by applying the statistics of the descendant XML elements.

Research limitations/implications

This work focused on the effectiveness of XML element search and the authors did not consider the search efficiency in this paper. One of the authors' next challenges is to reduce search time.

Originality/value

The paper proposes a method for improving the effectiveness of XML element search.

Keywords

Citation

Keyaki, A., Hatano, K. and Miyzaki, J. (2011), "Result‐reconstruction method to return useful XML elements", International Journal of Web Information Systems, Vol. 7 No. 4, pp. 360-380. https://doi.org/10.1108/17440081111187556

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2011, Emerald Group Publishing Limited

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