Alternative Query Generation for XML Keyword Search and Its Optimization

Abstract

Much work has been done in XML keyword search since users can obtain various information from XML databases without specific knowledge of the database schema and/or the knowledge about the query languages. Moreover, certain researches have suggested methods of returning some information that would help users understand search results. In this paper, we define alternative queries, which can be considered as different aspects of XML keyword search results. In XML keyword search, a keyword may match an unexpected text value or element name, then incorrect results that do not correspond to the users’ search intentions may be retrieved. When we generate alternative queries, it does not seem useful to generate alternative queries for all the results since they include several results retrieved by several interpretations. Thus, we propose a method of generating alternative queries from results classified by interpretations. We also propose a stack-based algorithm for generating alternative queries. Finally, the experimental results reveal that our proposal generates alternative queries efficiently.