An Adaptable Search System for Collections of Partially Structured Documents

need to understand the documents it is accessing. But what if the document collections you want to search are domain-specific or limited in size? This type of data source is everywhere, from corporate intranets to local Web sites. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a simple dialogue system that knows what data is available and can assist users in the search process? Furthermore, shouldn’t such a system be portable enough to be run on a completely different collection without much hassle? Here, I present such a search system, based on a generic framework that incorporates a simple domain-independent dialogue manager and an automatically created domain model. I constructed the model by exploiting the markup structure in documents and offer two different domains for which users can construct similar models rapidly, applicable without customization.