XML Information Retrieval Considering Physical Page Layout of Logical Elements

XML information retrieval (XML-IR) systems utilize the logical structure of XML documents for retrieving relevant elements. From a practical point of view, displaying the search results of XML-IR systems is important to achieve. When we search XML documents that are constructed by marking up documents originally composed of pages, such as scholarly articles or books, we would like result elements to be overlaid on the physical layout of pages in the user interfaces. We propose such a displaying method for keyword searches on XML documents of scholarly articles and ranking methods based on page units. We also need a new ranking method different from those used in simple element ranking because multiple result elements may be in the same page. We propose a ranking method considering the benefit that we obtain from the result elements and the reading effort that needs to be spent in reading the result elements and nearby elements to understand the content of the result elements.