Structural Information Retrieval in XML Documents: A Graph-based Approach

Abstract

Although retrieval engines are becoming more and more functional and efficient, they still have the drawback of not being able to locate the relevant documentary granularity, which results in ignoring the structural aspect. In the context of XML document, Information Retrieval Systems allow to return the user’s documentary granules. Several studies have used graphs to represent XML documents. However, in the scope of this research, the semi-structured document’s structure and that of a user’s query can be seen as arborescences composed of a hierarchy of nested elements. By using graph theory, by calculating the structural proximity and especially the intersection between these two arborescences. The article presents a model for structural information retrieval based on graphs. A collection of multimedia documents are randomly extracted from INEX (Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval) 2010 to validate the approach. The first results shows the interest of such an approach.