An Expansion Method of XML Element Retrieval Techniques into Web Documents

In this paper, we propose a method to expand XML element retrieval techniques into Web documents. XML element retrieval techniques return partial (sub) documents as search results, and are expected to be able to apply to other structured documents, namely, Web documents besides XML documents. The point is that physical document structures of Web documents are literally disorganized because Web documents are generated for not managing data but rendering on a Web browser. As another feature of Web documents, they contain many incomprehensive contents for human readers. To address challenges caused by these features, we propose 1) a reconstruction method of document structures according to logical structures of contents and 2) a filter for removing unimportant content which does not convey useful information to users. Our experimental evaluations showed that our proposed method improved search accuracy compared with both naive XML element retrieval approach and document retrieval approach.