A user guide for flex.

Abstract

Information retrieval focuses on organizing and storing data and retrieving useful information from it. With the advent of the web, the XML has became a preferred standard for storing documents. The documents which are available on the Web can be structured as well as semi-structured. Traditionally, information retrieval was concentrating on retrieving the entire document that is relevant to the query. But with XML retrieval, the elements of the document at various levels of granularity can be retrieved instead of the document as a whole. We call this type of retrieval flexible retrieval. As the software process matures, the code expands and becomes more difficult to debug and maintain. Having good documentation is critical. This year, we extend the work done by previous teams. Flex has been streamlined and applied to a newly parsed collection which gave us better, cleaner text. The main focus of this thesis is to document the complex process of flexible retrieval.