Semi-structured retrieval aims at providing focused answers to the users queries. A successful retrieval experience in semi-structured environment would mean a satisfactory combination of (a) matching or scoring and (b) selection of appropriate and focused fragments of the text. The need to retrieve items of different sizes arises today with users querying the retrieval systems with varied use case, user interface and screen-size requirements. Which means that different selection scenario serve different requirements and constraints. Hence we propose, a novel type of fusion; the \textit{selection fusion} -- a fusion methodology which fuses an all-purpose and comprehensive ranking of elements with a specific selection scheme, and also enables evaluation of the ranking in many selection perspectives. With the standard Wikipedia XML test collection, we are able to demonstrate that a strong and competitive baseline ranking system improves retrieval quality irrespective of the selection criteria. Our baseline ranking system is based on data fusion over the official submitted runs at INEX 2009.

The textual context of an element, structurally, contains traces of evidences. Utilizing this context in scoring is called contextualization. In this study we hypothesize that the context of an XML-element originated from its \textit{preceding} and \textit{following} elements in the sequential ordering of a document improves the quality of retrieval. In the tree form of the document's structure, \textit{kinship} contextualization means, contextualization based on the horizontal and vertical elements in the \textit{kinship tree,} or elements in closer to a wider structural kinship. We have tested several variants of kinship contextualization and verified notable improvements in comparison with the baseline system and gold standards in the retrieval of focused elements.

Context surrounding hyperlinked semi-structured documents, externally in the form of citations and internally in the form of hierarchical structure, contains a wealth of useful but implicit evidence about a document's relevance. These rich sources of information should be exploited as contextual evidence. This paper proposes various methods of accumulating evidence from the context, and measures the effect of contextual evidence on retrieval effectiveness for document and focused retrieval of hyperlinked semi-structured documents.