A Dempster-Shafer indexing for the focused retrieval of a hierarchically structured document space: Implementation and experiments on a web museum collection

Effective retrieval of hierarchically structured web documents should exploit the content and structural knowledge associated with the documents. This knowledge can be used to retrieve optimal documents: documents that contain relevant information, and from which users can browse, using the links in these documents, to retrieve further relevant documents. We refer to this approach as focussed retrieval. This paper investigates the effectiveness of a model for the focussed retrieval of hierarchically structured web documents based on the Dempster-Shafer theory of evidence. To allow for focussed retrieval, the representation of a document is defined as the aggregation of the representation of its own content and that of its child documents. To evaluate the model, we constructed a test collection based on a museum web site. From our experiments on this collection, the results show that the Dempster-Shafer theory, in particular, the aggregation, leads to an effective focussed retrieval of hierarchically structured web documents.

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