Feedback-Driven Result Ranking and Query Refinement for Exploring Semi-Structured Data Collections

Feedback process has been used extensively in document-centric applications, such as text retrieval and multimedia retrieval. Recently, there have been efforts to apply feedback to semi-structured XML document collections as well. In this paper, the authors note that feedback can also be an effective tool for exploring (through result ranking and query refinement) large semi-structured data collections. In particular, in large scale data sharing and curation environments, where the user may not know the structure of the data, queries may initially be overly vague.