Problems to interpret an attribute value as an Xpath expression

Hi alltogehther!
I have some basic problems, which I hope to be able to solve with your help. 
Basically what I want is to transform an xform document (not embedded in XHTML) into an html document with all the needed html form controls.
I know that it is not the intended way to display xform documents ;), but I have to do it like that in the meantime.
Lets say I have an xform document like the following: 

<xform:model>
    <xform:submitInfo id="SubmitInfo1"/>
        <xform:instance>
            <applicationform>
                <applicant>
                    <gender>m</gender>
                    <name>Roman Huditsch</name>
    ......

        </xform:instance>
    <xform:model>
    <xform:input ref="/applicationform/applicant[1]/name"/>
    <xform:input ref="/applicationform/applicant[2]/name"/>
    .... 

I'd like to use the value of a ref attribute as an XPath expression in my stylesheet. I want the processor to jump to the specified node and get the value from there. 
I used a "normal" <xsl:value-of select="@ref"/> ,but the processor didn't interpret it as an XPath expression but as a string. 

Does anyone know a method to tell the processor to use a source document's attribute value as an XPath expression in the stylesheet?

Best regards,
Roman