Improving Index Structures for Structured Document Retrieval

Structured document retrieval has established itself as a new research area in the overlap between Database Systems and Information Retrieval. This work proposes a filtering technique, that can be added to already existing index structures of many structured document retrieval systems. This new technique takes the contextual structure information of query and document database into account and reduces the occurrence sets returned by the original index structure drastically. This improves the performance of query evaluation. A measure is introduced that allows to quantify the added value of the proposed index structure. Based on this measure a heuristic is presented that allows to include only valuable context information in the index structure.