A growing number of text-rich XML repositories are being made available. As a result, more efforts have been deployed to provide XML fulltext search that combines querying structure with complex conditions on text ranging from simple keyword search to sophisticated proximity search composed with stemming and thesaurus. However, one of the key challenges in full-text search is to match users’ ex...

Every day, people widely use information retrieval (IR) systems to answer their questions. We utilized the TREC 2007 complex, interactive question answering (ciQA) track to measure the performance of humans using an interactive IR system to answer questions. Using our IR system, assessors searched for relevant documents and recorded answers to their questions. We submitted the assessors’ answer...

Multiple lines of research have developed Natural Language (NL) interfaces for formulating database queries. We build upon this work, but focus on presenting a highly detailed form of the answers in NL. The answers that we present are importantly based on the provenance of tuples in the query result, detailing not only the results but also their explanations. We develop a novel method for trans...