Sihem Amer-Yahia  AT&T Labs Research, 180 Park Avenue, Florham Park, New Jersey 07932 (sihemresearch.att.com). Dr. Amer-Yahia is a Senior Technical Specialist. She received her Ph.D. degree in computer science from the University Paris XI-Orsay and INRIA, France. She has worked on various aspects related to XML query processing and recently has been focusing on XML full-text search. She is the author of various conference and journal publications and conducts tutorials on the patents discussed in this paper. She is a coeditor of the XQuery Full-Text Language Specification and Use Cases published by the W3C Full-Text Task Force. Dr. Amer-Yahia is also the leader of the GalaTex project, a conformance implementation of XQuery Full-Text.

Chavdar Botev  Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, 4130 Upson Hall, Ithaca, New York 14850 (cbotevcs.cornell.edu). Mr. Botev is a Ph.D. student in computer science. He received B.S. and M.S. degrees in informatics from Sofia University, Bulgaria. He has been an invited expert of the W3C Full-Text Task Force since 2003 and an editor of XQuery 1.0 and XPath 2.0 Full-Text since 2004.

Jochen Dörre  IBM Deutschland Entwicklung GmbH, Schönaicherstrasse 220, 71032 Böblingen, Germany (doerrede.ibm.com). Dr. Dörre is a software engineer with a background in text search and text-mining technology. He joined IBM in 1997 and has worked on several software development projects in fields specializing on text categorization, text analytics integration, search over XML documents, and core search engine design and performance issues. He received his M.S. degree in computer science and his Ph.D. degree from the University of Stuttgart, Germany. Dr. Dörre is a member of the W3C XQuery Working Group and its Full-Text Task Force working on the XQuery and XPath Full-Text language.

Jayavel Shanmugasundaram  Department of Computer Science, Cornell University, 4105A Upson Hall, Ithaca, New York 14853 (jaics.cornell.edu). Dr. Shanmugasundaram is an Assistant Professor. He obtained a B.S. degree from the Regional Engineering College, Tiruchirappalli, India, an M.S. degree from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, and a Ph.D. degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, all in computer science. Prior to joining Cornell University, he spent two years at the IBM Almaden Research Center. His research interests include Internet data management, information retrieval, and query processing in emerging system architectures. He is the author of several publications and patents on these topics, and his research ideas have been implemented in commercial data management products. He is an invited expert and coeditor of the XQuery and XPath Full-Text language currently being developed by the W3C. Dr. Shanmugasundaram is the recipient of a National Science Foundation CAREER Award, an IBM Faculty Award, and the James and Mary Tien Excellence in Teaching Award.