Query biased snippet generation in XML search

Snippets are used by almost every text search engine to complement ranking scheme in order to effectively handle user searches, which are inherently ambiguous and whose relevance semantics are difficult to assess. Despite the fact that XML is a standard representation format of web data, research on generating result snippets for XML search remains untouched. In this paper we present a system, eXtract, which addresses this important yet open problem. We identify that a good XML result snippet should be a self-contained meaningful information unit of a small size that effectively summarizes this query result and differentiates it from others, according to which users can quickly assess the relevance of the query result. We have designed and implemented a novel algorithm to satisfy these requirements and verified its efficiency and effectiveness through experiments.