Exploiting Link Evidence to Improve XML Information Retrieval

Abstract

In this paper, we examine how link evidence can be exploited in XML information retrieval (XML IR) field. We experimented some well-known link analysis algorithms, i.e., PageRank, HITS and SALSA, in XML IR context. We propose to re-rank XML elements by combining their topical score with their link score computed according to one of the above algorithms. These experiments, performed on the Wikipedia collection provided by INEX, showed that the use of links in topical context improves the retrieval accuracy