Weighting tags and paths in XML documents according to their topic generalization
Text-centric (or document-centric) XML document retrieval aims to rank search results according to their relevance to a given query. To do this, most existing methods mainly rely on content terms and often ignore an important factor  the XML tags and paths, which are useful in determining the important contents of a document. In some previous studies, each unique tag/path is assigned a weight based on domain (expert) knowledge. However, such a manual assignment is both inefficient and subjective. In this paper, we propose an automatic method to infer the weights of tags/paths according to the topical relationship between the corresponding elements and the whole documents. The more the corresponding element can generalize the documents topic, the more the tag/path is considered to be important. We define a model based on Average Topic Generalization (ATG), which integrates several features used in previous studies. We evaluate the performance of the ATG-based model on two real data sets, the IEEECS collection and the Wikipedia collection, from two different perspectives: the correlation between the weights generated by ATG and those set by experts, and the performance of XML retrieval based on ATG. Experimental results show that the tag/path weights generated by ATG are highly correlated with the manually assigned weights, and the ATG model significantly improves XML retrieval effectiveness.
topic generalization xml retrieval tag/path weighting model