Exploratory search over semi-structured documents

Exploratory search is an information seeking task in which users are not familiar with the specification of their information need and how to answer it and the system helps them in this regard. In this thesis, we study how metadata and structure associated with textual documents can be helpful in supporting exploratory search tasks. We first study how metadata and structure can be exploited to manage documents and support access to semi-structured documents more effectively. We define semi-structured documents as documents that beside a textual content, contain tags and other markers that separate documents into different parts such as title, body, metadata, etc. Then we study, in two case studies, how metadata and structure can help to support exploratory search tasks.