Overview of the INEX 2008 Efficiency Track

This paper presents an overview of the Efficiency Track that was newly introduced to INEX in 2008. The new INEX Efficiency Track is intended to provide a common forum for the evaluation of both the effectiveness and efficiency of XML ranked retrieval approaches on real data and real queries. As opposed to the purely synthetic XMark or XBench benchmark settings that are still prevalent in efficiency-oriented XML retrieval tasks, the Efficiency Track continues the INEX tradition using a rich pool of manually assessed relevance judgments for measuring retrieval effectiveness. Thus, one of the main goals is to attract more groups from the DB community to INEX, being able to study effectiveness/efficiency trade-offs in XML ranked retrieval for a broad audience from both the DB and IR communities. The Efficiency Track significantly extends the Ad-Hoc Track by systematically investigating different types of queries and retrieval scenarios, such as classic ad-hoc search, high-dimensional query expansion settings, and queries with a deeply nested structure (with all topics being available in both the NEXI-style CO and CAS formulations, as well as in their XPath 2.0 Full-Text counterparts).