Ontology-driven personalized information retrieval for XML documents
Abstract
This paper addresses the challenge of improving information retrieval from semi-structured eXtensible Markup Language (XML) documents. Traditional information retrieval systems (IRS) often overlook user-specific needs and return identical results for the same query, despite differences in users' knowledge, preferences, and objectives. We integrate external semantic resources, namely a domain ontology and user profiles, into the retrieval process. Documents, queries, and user profiles are represented as vectors of weighted concepts. The ontology applies a concept-weighting mechanism that emphasizes highly specific concepts, as lower-level nodes in the hierarchy provide more precise and targeted information. Relevance is assessed using semantic similarity measures that capture conceptual relationships beyond keyword matching, enabling personalized and fine-grained matching among user profiles, queries, and documents. Experimental results show that combining ontologies with user profiles improves retrieval effectiveness, achieving higher precision and recall than keyword-based approaches. Overall, the proposed framework enhances the relevance and adaptability of XML search results, supporting more user-centered retrieval.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.21139,
title = {Ontology-driven personalized information retrieval for XML documents},
author = {Ounnaci Iddir and Ahmed-ouamer Rachid and Tai Dinh},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21139},
year = {2026}
}