User Needs and Strategies in Structured Information Retrieval

Abstract. Structured information retrieval studies the combination of the content and the structure information of documents to perform differ-ent IR tasks. Different approaches such as structure or context weighting (e.g. [24], [10]) make use of the structural information of documents to improve information retrieval effectiveness. However, most of these stud-ies do not take the user into account and they use the same strategy to perform all types of queries. This work aims to identify the relationship between user task and strategies on the usage of structural information when performing that task. The theoretical part of this research consists of three main phases designed to acquire a good understanding of (1) the nature of user tasks on structured documents, (2) the types of structural information and its role in retrieval strategies, and (3) the formalization of a model to correlate both, user tasks and strategies. Two different experimental studies are planned. The first one investigates the combi-nation of evidence from different strategies for the defined user tasks, and the second one investigates how to use relevance feedback techniques to refine the structural information for a given user need.