Using Personalization to Improve XML Retrieval

As the amount of information increases every day and the users normally formulate short and ambiguous queries, personalized search techniques are becoming almost a must. Using the information about the user stored in a user profile, these techniques retrieve results that are closer to the user preferences. On the other hand, the information is being stored more and more in an semi-structured way, and XML has emerged as a standard for representing and exchanging this type of data. XML search allows a higher retrieval effectiveness, due to its ability to retrieve and to show the user specific parts of the documents instead of the full document. In this paper we propose several personalization techniques in the context of XML retrieval. We try to combine the different approaches where personalization may be applied: query reformulation, re-ranking of results and retrieval model modification. The experimental results obtained from a user study using a parliamentary document collection support the validity of our approach.