This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-proceedings of the 5th International Workshop of the Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval, INEX 2006, held at Dagstuhl Castle, Germany, in December 2006. The papers are organized in topical sections on methodology and seven additional tracks on ad-hoc, natural language processing, heterogeneous collection, multimedia, interactive, use case, as well as document mining.

The ultimate goal of many information access systems (e.g., digital libraries, the Web, intranets) is to provide the right content to their end-users. This content is increasingly a mixture of text, multimedia, and metadata, and is formatted according to the adopted -W3C standard for information repositories, the so-called eXtensible Markup L- guage (XML). Whereas many of today's information access systems still treat do- ments as single large (text) blocks, XML offers the opportunity to exploit the internal structure of documents in order to allow for more precise access thus providing more...

Content-oriented XML retrieval has been receiving increasing interest due to the widespread use of eXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is becoming a standard document format on the Web, in digital libraries, and publishing. By exploiting the enriched source of syntactic and semantic information that XML markup provides, XML information retrieval (IR) systems aim to implement a more focused retrieval strategy and return document components, so-called XML elements instead of complete documents in response to a user query. This focused retrieval approach is of particular bene't for...