Overview of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX) 2002

The INitiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval (INEX) aims at providing an infrastructure for evaluating the effectiveness of content-oriented XML retrieval. In the first round of INEX, in 2002, a test collection of real world XML documents along with standard topics and respective relevance assessments has been created. Research groups from 36 different organisations participated in this collaborative effort. In this article we describe the test collection and how it was constructed. An overview of the metrics used to evaluate the effectiveness of XML retrieval approaches and of the evaluation results of 51 submissions from the INEX 2002 participants is also provided.