Semantic search via XML fragments: a high-precision approach to IR

In some IR applications, it is desirable to adopt a high precision search strategy to return a small set of documents that are highly focused and relevant to the user's information need. With these applications in mind, we investigate semantic search using the XML Fragments query language on text corpora automatically pre-processed to encode semantic information useful for retrieval. We identify three XML Fragment operations that can be applied to a query to conceptualize, restrict, or relate terms in the query. We demonstrate how these operations can be used to address four different query-time semantic needs: to specify target information type, to disambiguate keywords, to specify search term context, or to relate select terms in the query. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our semantic search technology through a series of experiments using the two applications in which we embed this technology and show that it yields significant improvement in precision in the search results.