What Do Users Think of an XML Element Retrieval System?

We describe the University of Amsterdam’s participation in the INEX 2005 Interactive Track, mainly focusing on a comparative experiment, in which the baseline system Daffodil/HyREX is compared to a home-grown XML element retrieval system (xmlfind). The xmlfind system provides an interface for an XML information retrieval search engine, using an index that contains all the individual XML elements in the IEEE collection. Our main findings are the following. First, test persons show appreciation for both systems, but xmlfind receives higher scores than Daffodil. Second, the interface seems to take the structural dependencies between retrieved elements into account in an appropriate way: although retrieved elements may be overlapping in whole or in part, none of the test persons regarded this as problematic. Third, the general opinion of the test persons on the usefulness of XML retrieval systems was unequivocally positive, and their responses highlight many of the hoped advantages of an XML retrieval system.