text: Keyword search is the most popular querying technique on semistructured data. Keyword queries are simple and con- venient. However, as a consequence of their imprecision, the quality of their answers is poor and the existing algorithms do not scale satisfactorily. In this paper, we introduce the novel concept of cohesive keyword queries for tree data. Intuitively, a cohesiveness relationship on keywords indicates that they should form a cohesive whole in a query result. Cohesive keyword queries allow term nesting and keyword repetition. Although more expressive, they are as simple as flat keyword queries. We provide formal semantics for cohesive keyword queries rank- ing query results on the proximity of the keyword instances. We design a stack based algorithm which efficiently evaluates cohesive keyword queries. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach outperforms in quality previous filtering semantics and our algorithm scales smoothly on queries of even 20 keywords on large datasets.
  @cite_5: Inspired by the great success of information retrieval (IR) style keyword search on the web, keyword search on XML has emerged recently. The difference between text database and XML database results in three new challenges: (1) Identify the user search intention, i.e. identify the XML node types that user wants to search for and search via. (2) Resolve keyword ambiguity problems: a keyword can appear as both a tag name and a text value of some node; a keyword can appear as the text values of different XML node types and carry different meanings. (3) As the search results are sub-trees of the XML document, new scoring function is needed to estimate its relevance to a given query. However, existing methods cannot resolve these challenges, thus return low result quality in term of query relevance. In this paper, we propose an IR-style approach which basically utilizes the statistics of underlying XML data to address these challenges. We first propose specific guidelines that a search engine should meet in both search intention identification and relevance oriented ranking for search results. Then based on these guidelines, we design novel formulae to identify the search for nodes and search via nodes of a query, and present a novel XML TF*IDF ranking strategy to rank the individual matches of all possible search intentions. Lastly, the proposed techniques are implemented in an XML keyword search engine called XReal, and extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.
  @cite_40: XSEarch, a semantic search engine for XML, is presented. XSEarch has a simple query language, suitable for a naive user. It returns semantically related document fragments that satisfy the user's query. Query answers are ranked using extended information-retrieval techniques and are generated in an order similar to the ranking. Advanced indexing techniques were developed to facilitate efficient implementation of XSEarch. The performance of the different techniques as well as the recall and the precision were measured experimentally. These experiments indicate that XSEarch is efficient, scalable and ranks quality results highly.
  @cite_10: 
summary: Keyword queries facilitate the user with the ease of freely forming queries by using only keywords. Approaches that evaluate keyword queries are currently very popular especially in the web where numerous sources contribute data often with unknown structure and where end users with no specialized skills need to find useful information. However, the imprecision of keyword queries results often in low precision and or recall of the search systems. Some approaches (a) combine structural constraints @cite_40 with keyword search while others that (b) try to infer useful structural information implied by simple keyword queries @cite_5 @cite_10 by exploiting statistical information of the queries and the underlying datasets. These approaches require a minimum knowledge of the dataset or a heavy dataset preprocessing in order to be able to accurately assess candidate keyword query results.