The existing XML storage methods which use relational data model, usually store path information for every node type including literal contents in order to keep the structural information of XML documents. Such path information is usually maintained by an inverted index to efficiently process XPath queries for large XML documents. In this study, We propose an improved approach that retrieve information from the large volume of XML documents stored in a relational database, while using a segment-based inverted index for path searches. Our new approach can reduce the number of searching an inverted index for getting target path information. We show the effectiveness of this approach through several experiments that compare XPath query performance with the existing methods.