abstract information retrieval from structured documents represented by attribute grammars.pdfVIP

Information Retrieval from Structured Documents Represented by Attribute Grammars * Alda Lopes Gançarski alda.lopes@lip6.fr ** Pedro Rangel Henriques prh@di.uminho.pt Abstract This paper presents a system for Information Retrieval (IR) from collections of structured documents represented by Attribute Grammars (AG). Each document corresponds to a syntactic tree with nodes decorated with sets of attributes. The values of these attributes correspond to characteristics which specify the semantics of the textual content and the structure in order to perform IR. First, we show how to generate such grammars. Then, we explain how the AG analyser constructs document representations to obtain a ranked list of the result to the queries. The relevance of the document components is estimated using textual and structural information. This information is given by a set of heuristics or, alternatively, is explicitly introduced into the system by a specific document. 1. Introduction It has been recently a tremendous growth of the specification of structured textual information using the standards Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML), Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and eXtensible Markup Language (XML). When a collection of documents share the kind of information they deal with, it is natural to think about describing that information in the same way for all of them. For example, business letters have almost all the same structure, so it is desirable that this