Patent ID: 7428538

Claim:
A method, comprising: obtaining paths for all elements in at least one document, and assigning query terms' weight for the paths; and ranking paths, in which ln ⁢ N n i ⁢ is the inverse document frequency (IDF) value of query term t i , which represents the query term's weight, N denotes a number of documents in a corpus, n i represents a number of documents containing the term t i , and Q is the number of query terms in a query, using the calculation: Rank ⁢ ⁢ ( Path p ) = ∑ i = 1 Q ⁢ Weight ⁢ ⁢ ( t i , E j ) × ln ⁢ N n i where Weight (t i ,E j ) is a weight of the query term t i in an arbitrary composite element E j associated with the at least one document, and path p is a path of the at least one document.