XML-Structured Documents: Retrievable Units and Inheritance

We consider the retrieval of XML-structured documents, and of passages from such documents, defined as elements of the XML structure. These are considered from the point of view of passage retrieval, as a form of document retrieval. A retrievable unit (an element chosen as defining suitable passages for retrieval) is a textual document in its own right, but may inherit information from the other parts of the same document. Again, this inheritance is defined in terms of the XML structure. All retrievable units are mapped onto a common field structure, and the ranking function is a standard document retrieval function with a suitable field weighting. A small experiment to demonstrate the idea, using INEX data, is described. Reprinted from: H. L. Larsen, G. Pasi, D. Ortiz-Arroyo, T. Andreasen and H. Christiansen (eds), Flexible query answering systems, Milan, June 2006. Springer, 2006. (pp 121-132).