Structure Weight

Definition

In structured text retrieval, the structure of a text component may be used to estimate the relevance of that component. This is done by associating a weight to the structure reflecting its significance when estimating the relevance of the component for a given query.

Key Points

Associating weight to the structure of a component in itself is not new, and several investigations have been reported for whole document retrieval. This entry is concerned with structure weights in the context of structured text retrieval, where the aim is to exploit the document structure to return document components, instead of whole documents.

In structured text retrieval, not all document components will trigger the same user satisfaction when returned as answers to queries. In the context of structured documents mark-up in XML, some document components, i.e., XML elements, may not be appropriate to return because they are too small, or a tag type that does not contain informative content,...