Title: Possibilistic model for aggregated search in XML documents

Authors: Fatma Zohra Bessai-Mechmache; Zaia Alimazighi

Addresses: Research Centre on Scientific and Technical Information, Rue des Frères Aissiou, Ben Aknoun, 16030, Algiers, Algeria. ' University of Science and Technology, USTHB, LSI, BP 32 El Alia, Bab Ezzouar, 16111, Algiers, Algeria

Abstract: In this paper, we are interested in content-oriented XML information retrieval which aims to retrieve not a set of relevant documents but a number of elements (parts of document) relevant to a query. Our goal is to revisit the granularity of the unit to be returned. More precisely, instead of returning the whole document or a list of disjoint elements of a document, as it is usually done in the most XML information retrieval systems, we attempt to build the best elements aggregation (set of non-redundant elements) which is likely to be relevant to a query composed of keywords. Our approach is based on possibilistic networks. The network structure provides a natural representation of links between a document, its elements and its content, and allows an automatic selection of a combination of independent elements (i.e., set of non-redundant elements from different parts of the document tree) that better answers the user's query. Experiments carried out on a sub-collection of INEX INitiative for the evaluation of XML (INEX) retrieval, showed the effectiveness of the approach.

Keywords: possibilistic networks; aggregated search; XML information retrieval; XML documents; complementarity; independence; document elements; granularity; element aggregation; non-redundant elements; keyword queries; keyword search.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIIDS.2012.049113

International Journal of Intelligent Information and Database Systems, 2012 Vol.6 No.4, pp.381 - 404

Received: 05 Apr 2011
Accepted: 25 Nov 2011

Published online: 16 Aug 2014 *

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