Definition
When searching unstructured plain text, the user is limited in the expressive power of their query – they can only ask for documents that are about something. When structure is present in the document, and with a query language that supports its use, the user is able to write far more precise queries. For example, searching for “smith” in a document is not necessarily equivalent to searching for “smith” as an author of a document. This increase in expressive power should lead to an increase in precision with no loss in recall. By specifying that “smith” should be the author, all those instances where “smith” was the profession will be dropped (increasing precision), while all those in which “smith” is the author will still be found (maintaining recall).
Historical Background
With the proliferation of structured and semi-structured markup languages such as SGML and XML came the possibility of unifying database and information retrieval technologies. The Evaluation of XML...
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Trotman, A. (2018). Processing Structural Constraints. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M.T. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-8265-9_280
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