A Model for Structured Document Retrieval: Empirical Investigations

Documents often display a structure, e.g., several sections, each with several subsections and so on. Taking into account the structure of a document allows the retrieval process to focus on those parts of the document that are most relevant to an information need. In previous work, we developed a model for the representation and the retrieval of structured documents. This paper reports the first experimental study of the effectiveness and applicability of the model.