Improving results for the INEX thorough task.

Abstract

Information retrieval strategies of earlier years were developed around the idea of retrieving entire documents in response to a user’s request. But with the widespread use of the web and markup languages like XML (Extensible Markup Language) for representing documents, the idea of retrieving at a more granular (element) level evolved. And with the continuous growth in XML information repositories, the focus is now on developing effective element retrieval strategies. Our element retrieval strategy, called Flex (flexible retrieval), is designed to work with a semistructured document collection of XML documents such as the INEX 2009 collection. In this thesis, we focus on improving the results for the INEX Thorough task by combining article retrieval with Flex for element generation and retrieval. Experiments to determine the best value of slope and pivot are necessary to enable the use of Lnu-ltu weighting by Flex. The results of our experiments to produce improved results for the INEX 2009 Thorough task are described and reported.