Improving Results for the 2009 and 2010 INEX Focused Tasks

Information retrieval systems aim to retrieve precise and relevant information in response to a user's query. In past years entire documents which were considered to be relevant or highly correlating were returned to users. However with growth of the web and large numbers of XML documents, smaller elements or passages can be returned to the user for more precise results. This thesis explains Flex, our system for dynamic element retrieval, where in XML elements rather than entire documents are retrieved and returned to the user. It also gives an overview of the process of generating highly correlating elements (from a large document collection) for a set of queries. The aim of this thesis is to improve the results for the INEX 2009 and 2010 Ad Hoc Focused Tasks. The Focused Tasks require that each query return a result set of non-overlapping elements. This thesis describes the techniques involved in producing such elements and compares the results produced.