Vadlamudi, Sandeep2011-04-082011-04-082010-08https://hdl.handle.net/11299/102466University of Minnesota M.S. thesis. August 2010. Major: Computer science. Advisor: Donald B. Crouch. 1 computer file (PDF); vi, 40 pages.Information retrieval (IR) is the science of retrieving information associated with a given query that is judged relevant by the user. With the use of XML, a mechanism was developed to identify the structure of a document, enabling the retrieval of elements from within documents. Now we can retrieve relevant elements at different levels of granularity. We use flexible retrieval to retrieve elements from a document [3]. The goal of this thesis is to improve the results of the INEX Focused and Relevant in Context (RIC) tasks. In the Focused task, we are required to produce a rank ordered list of non-overlapping elements, whereas in the RIC task, we are required to retrieve relevant focused elements from relevant articles. In this thesis, we discuss various methodologies that we have developed to improve our results for the Focused and RIC tasks. Experiments demonstrating the efficacy of our methods are detailed herein.en-USInformation retrieval (IR)Flexible retrievalINEXRelevant in Context (RIC)Extensible Markup Language (XML)Overlap removalComputer ScienceThesis or Dissertation