Logic-Based XML Information Retrieval for Determining the Best Element to Retrieve

This paper presents UOWD-Sharif team’s approach for XML information retrieval. This approach is an extension of PLIR which is an experimental knowledge-based information retrieval system. This system like PLIR utilizes plausible inferences to first infer the relevance of sentences in XML documents and then propagates the relevance to the other textual units in the document tree. Two approaches have been used for propagation of confidence. The first approach labeled “propagate-DS” first propagates the confidence from sentences to upper elements and then combines these evidences by applying Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to estimate the confidence in that element. The second approach “DS-propagate” first applies the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence to combine the evidences and then propagates the combined confidence to the parent element. The second approach performs relatively better than the first approach.