Relationships in Structured Text Retrieval

Definition

In structured text retrieval, the relationship between text components may be used in ranking components relative to a given query.

Key Points

In a structured text document, there exists a relationship between the document components. In the context of XML retrieval, the relationships between elements are provided by the logical structure of the XML mark-up. An element, unless it is the root element (the document itself), has a parent element, which itself may have a parent element. Similarly, non-leaf elements have children elements, and so on. Considering relationships between elements appears to be beneficial for XML retrieval. For instance, in a collection of scientific articles, it is reasonable to assume that the “abstract” of an article is a better indicator of what the article is about than a “future work” section in the same article. The challenge in XML retrieval is what types of relationship should be considered, and how this information can be used to score...