The University of Amsterdam at INEX 2004

This paper describes the INEX 2004 participation of the Informatics Institute of the University of Amsterdam. We completely revamped our XML retrieval system, now implemented as a mixture language model on top of a standard search engine. To speed up structural reasoning, we indexed the collection’s structure in a separate database. We address three research questions. First, we investigate the effectiveness of blind feedback based on topranking XML-elements. Second, we analyze the impact of removing overlapping elements in the result set. Third, for the contentand-structure topics, we want to compare the relative effectiveness of approaches that interpret the topic strict, or ignore the structural hints altogether. Experimental evidence is based on both of the INEX 2004 ad hoc tasks, content-only and content-and-structure, evaluated against a range of metrics.