Integrating Structure in the Probabilistic Model for Information Retrieval

In databases or in the World Wide Web, many documents are in a structured format (e.g. XML). We propose in this article to extend the classical IR probabilistic model in order to take into account the structure through the weighting of tags. Our approach includes a learning step in which the weight of each tag is computed. This weight estimates the probability that the tag distinguishes the terms which are the most relevant. Our model has been evaluated on a large collection during INEX IR evaluation campaigns.