XML 关键词检索的查询理解

与纯文本文档集相比,使用语义标签标注的半结构化的XML文档集,有助于信息检索系统更好地理解待检索文档.同样,结构化查询,比如SQL,XQuery和Xpath,相对于纯关键词查询更加清晰地表达了用户的查询意图.这二者都能够帮助信息检索系统获得更好的检索精度.但关键词查询因其简单和易用性,仍被广泛使用.提出了XNodeRelation算法,以自动推断关键词查询的结构化信息(条件/目标节点类型).与已有的推断算法相比,综合了XML文档集的模式和统计信息以及查询关键词出现的上下文及其关联关系等推断用户的查询意图.大量的实验验证了该算法的有效性.     

基于贝叶斯网络的XML文档查询模型

目前XML查询语言及查询界面对Web用户过于复杂,该文描述了一种XML文档索引机制,在此基础上建立了一个通用的贝叶斯网络查询模型。用户只需在交互界面输入自然语言描述的查询,系统就能对其实现基于语义的构造,由它生成多个结构化查询;对这些查询建立贝叶斯网络,计算查询在给定文档下的概率,选择概率最大的前3个查询提交给系统执行。     

Conceptual clustering in information retrieval

Clustering is used in information retrieval systems to enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the retrieval process. Clustering is achieved by partitioning the documents in a collection into classes such that documents that are associated with each other are assigned to the same cluster. This association is generally determined by examining the index term representation of documents or by capturing user feedback on queries on the system. In cluster-oriented systems, the retrieval process can be enhanced by employing characterization of clusters. In this paper, we present the techniques to develop clusters and cluster characterizations by employing user viewpoint. The user viewpoint is elicited through a structured interview based on a knowledge acquisition technique, namely personal construct theory. It is demonstrated that the application of personal construct theory results in a cluster representation that can be used during query as well as to assign new documents to the appropriate clusters.     

XML应用于信息检索的研究

随着互联网上XML文档的日益增多,如何对其内容进行有效的检索查询已经成为亟待解决的问题。本文的主要目的在于针对XML在信息检索中的应用作一深入的探讨,讨论XML检索与传统信息检索的不同和目前一些通用的XML存储处理的方法,对其中用到的关键技术、可行性和性能都作了比较分析。在此基础上还提出一种新的检索模型和系统框架,结合当前的全文搜索和数据库技术,具有一定的实用性。     

Examining topic shifts in content-oriented XML retrieval

Content-oriented XML retrieval systems support access to XML repositories by retrieving, in response to user queries, XML document components (XML elements) instead of whole documents. The retrieved XML elements should not only contain information relevant to the query, but also provide the right level of granularity. In INEX, the INitiative for the Evaluation of XML retrieval, a relevant element is defined to be at the right level of granularity if it is exhaustive and specific to the query. Specificity was specifically introduced to capture how focused an element is on the query (i.e., discusses no other irrelevant topics). To score XML elements according to how exhaustive and specific they are given a query, the content and logical structure of XML documents have been widely used. One source of evidence that has led to promising results with respect to retrieval effectiveness is element length. This work aims at examining a new source of evidence deriving from the semantic decomposition of XML documents. We consider that XML documents can be semantically decomposed through the application of a topic segmentation algorithm. Using the semantic decomposition and the logical structure of XML documents, we propose a new source of evidence, the number of topic shifts in an element, to reflect its relevance and more particularly its specificity. This paper has three research objectives. Firstly, we investigate the characteristics of XML elements reflected by their number of topic shifts. Secondly, we compare topic shifts to element length, by incorporating each of them as a feature in a retrieval setting and examining their effects in estimating the relevance of XML elements given a query. Finally, we use the number of topic shifts as evidence for capturing specificity to provide a focused access to XML repositories.     

Relevance feedback revisited: dealing with content and structure in XML documents

Relevance feedback (RF) is a technique that allows to enrich an initial query according to the user feedback. The goal is to express more precisely the user’s needs. Some open issues arise when considering semi-structured documents like XML documents. They are mainly related to the form of XML documents which mix content and structure information and to the new granularity of information. Indeed, the main objective of XML retrieval is to select relevant elements in XML documents instead of whole documents. Most of the RF approaches proposed in XML retrieval are simple adaptation of traditional RF to the new granularity of information. They usually enrich queries by adding terms extracted from relevant elements instead of terms extracted from whole documents. In this article, we describe a new approach of RF that takes advantage of two sources of evidence: the content and the structure. We propose to use the query term proximity to select terms to be added to the initial query and to use generic structures to express structural constraints. Both sources of evidence are used in different combined forms. Experiments were carried out within the INEX evaluation campaign and results show the effectiveness of our approaches.     

Locating XML Documents in a Peer-to-Peer Network Using Distributed Hash Tables

One of the key challenges in a peer-to-peer (P2P) network is to efficiently locate relevant data sources across a large number of participating peers. With the increasing popularity of the extensible markup language (XML) as a standard for information interchange on the Internet, XML is commonly used as an underlying data model for P2P applications to deal with the heterogeneity of data and enhance the expressiveness of queries. In this paper, we address the problem of efficiently locating relevant XML documents in a P2P network, where a user poses queries in a language such as XPath. We have developed a new system called psiX that runs on top of an existing distributed hashing framework. Under the psiX system, each XML document is mapped into an algebraic signature that captures the structural summary of the document. An XML query pattern is also mapped into a signature. The query's signature is used to locate relevant document signatures. Our signature scheme supports holistic processing of query patterns without breaking them into multiple path queries and processing them individually. The participating peers in the network collectively maintain a collection of distributed hierarchical indexes for the document signatures. Value indexes are built to handle numeric and textual values in XML documents. These indexes are used to process queries with value predicates. Our experimental study on PlanetLab demonstrates that psiX provides an efficient location service in a P2P network for a wide variety of XML documents.     

Visual exploration and retrieval of XML document collections with the generic system X2

This article reports on the XML retrieval system x² that has been developed at the University of Munich over the last 5 years. In a typical session with x², the user first browses a structural summary of the XML database in order to select interesting elements and keywords occurring in documents. Using this intermediate result, queries combining structure and textual references are composed semiautomatically. After query evaluation, the full set of answers is presented in a visual and structured way. x² largely exploits the structure found in documents, queries and answers to enable new interactive visualization and exploration techniques that support mixed IR and database-oriented querying, thus bridging the gap between these three views on the data to be retrieved. Another salient characteristic of x² that distinguishes it from other visual query systems for XML is that it supports various degrees of detailedness in the presentation of answers, as well as techniques for dynamically reordering, grouping and ranking retrieved elements once the complete answer set has been computed.     

A query-oriented XML text summarization for mobile devices

Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a simple, flexible text format derived from SGML, which is originally designed to support large-scale electronic publishing. Nowadays XML plays a fundamental role in the exchange of a wide variety of data on the Web. As XML allows designers to create their own customized tags, enables the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications, devices and organizations, lots of works in soft computing employ XML to take control and responsibility for the information, such as fuzzy markup language, and accordingly there are lots of XML-based data or documents. However, most of mobile and interactive ubiquitous multimedia devices have restricted hardware such as CPU, memory, and display screen. So, it is essential to compress an XML document/element collection to a brief summary before it is delivered to the user according to his/her information need. Query-oriented XML text summarization aims to provide users a brief and readable substitution of the original retrieved documents/elements according to the user’s query, which can relieve users’ reading burden effectively. We propose a query-oriented XML summarization system QXMLSum, which extracts sentences and combines them as a summary based on three kinds of features: user’s queries, the content of XML documents/elements, and the structure of XML documents/elements. Experiments on the IEEE-CS datasets used in Initiative for the Evaluation of XML Retrieval show that the query-oriented XML summary generated by QXMLSum is competitive.     

An overview on XML similarity: Background, current trends and future directions

In recent years, XML has been established as a major means for information management, and has been broadly utilized for complex data representation (e.g. multimedia objects). Owing to an unparalleled increasing use of the XML standard, developing efficient techniques for comparing XML-based documents becomes essential in the database and information retrieval communities. In this paper, we provide an overview of XML similarity/comparison by presenting existing research related to XML similarity. We also detail the possible applications of XML comparison processes in various fields, ranging over data warehousing, data integration, classification/clustering and XML querying, and discuss some required and emergent future research directions.     

Integrating document and data retrieval based on XML

For querying structured and semistructured data, data retrieval and document retrieval are two valuable and complementary techniques that have not yet been fully integrated. In this paper, we introduce integrated information retrieval (IIR), an XML-based retrieval approach that closes this gap. We introduce the syntax and semantics of an extension of the XQuery language called XQuery/IR. The extended language realizes IIR and thereby allows users to formulate new kinds of queries by nesting ranked document retrieval and precise data retrieval queries. Furthermore, we detail index structures and efficient query processing approaches for implementing XQuery/IR. Based on a new identification scheme for nodes in node-labeled tree structures, the extended index structures require only a fraction of the space of comparable index structures that only support data retrieval.     

A survey on tree matching and XML retrieval

With the increasing number of available XML documents, numerous approaches for retrieval have been proposed in the literature. They usually use the tree representation of documents and queries to process them, whether in an implicit or explicit way. Although retrieving XML documents can be considered as a tree matching problem between the query tree and the document trees, only a few approaches take advantage of the algorithms and methods proposed by the graph theory. In this paper, we aim at studying the theoretical approaches proposed in the literature for tree matching and at seeing how these approaches have been adapted to XML querying and retrieval, from both an exact and an approximate matching perspective. This study will allow us to highlight theoretical aspects of graph theory that have not been yet explored in XML retrieval.     

How many performance measures to evaluate information retrieval systems?

Evaluating effectiveness of information retrieval systems is achieved by performing on a collection of documents, a search, in which a set of test queries are performed and, for each query, the list of the relevant documents. This evaluation framework also includes performance measures making it possible to control the impact of a modification of search parameters. The program trec_eval calculates a large number of measures, some being more used like the mean average precision or recall-precision curves. The motivation of our work is to compare all measures and to help the user to choose a small number of them when evaluating different information retrieval systems. In this paper, we present the study we carried out from a massive data analysis of TREC results. Relationships between the 130 measures calculated by trec_eval for individual queries are investigated, and we show that they can be clustered into homogeneous clusters.     

基于文档实例的中文信息检索

传统的信息检索系统基于关键词建立索引并进行信息检索.这些系统存在查询返回文档集大、准确率低和普通用户不便于构造查询等不足.为此,该文提出基于文档实例的信息检索,即以已有文档作为样本,在文档库中检索与样本文档相似的所有文档.文中给出了基于文档实例的中文信息检索的解决方法和实现技术.初步实验结果表明该方法是行之有效的.     

一种新的基于B~+树结构的XML元素的索引方法

提出了一种用于搜索XML文档的新的索引方法即RIST。通过采用代码化的结构序列(SES)来表示XML文档和XML查询,得出查询XML数据等同于查找子序列匹配。RIST采用树结构作为查询的基本单元,从而避免了代价高昂的连接操作。另外,RIST还在XML文档的内容和结构上提供了一个统一的索引,所以它的一个很明显的优势就是克服了仅仅根据内容或结构建立索引的弊端。实验表明RIST在支持结构查询上是一种高效的方法。     

XML-based requirements engineering for an electronic clearinghouse

We present methods and tools to support XML-based requirements engineering for an electronic clearinghouse that connects trading partners in the telecommunications area. The original semi-structured requirements, locally known as business rules, were written as message specifications in a non-standardized and error-prone format using MS Word. To remedy the resulting software failures and faults, we first formalized the requirements by designing an W3C XML Schema for the precise definition of the requirements structure. The schema allows a highly structured representation of the essential information in eXtensible Markup Language (XML). Second, to offer the requirements engineers the ability to edit the XML documents in a friendly way while preserving their information structure, we developed a custom editor called XLEdit. Third, by developing a converter from MS Word to the target XML format, we helped the requirements engineers to migrate the existing business rules. Fourth, we developed translators from the structured requirements to schema languages, which enabled automated generation of message-validation code. The increase in customer satisfaction and clearinghouse-service efficiency are primary gains from the investment in the technology for structured requirements editing and validation.     

一种新的基于B＋树结构的XML元素的索引方法

摘要：本文提出了一种用于搜索XML文档的新的索引方法即RIST。通过采用代码化的结构序列（SES）来表示XML文档和XML查询,我们得出查询XML数据等同于查找子序列匹配。RIST采用树结构作为查询的基本单元,从而避免了代价高昂的连接操作。另外,RIST还在XML文档的内容和结构上提供了一个统一的索引,所以它的一个很明显的优势就是克服了仅仅根据内容或结构建立索引的弊端。实验表明RIST在支持结构查询上是一种高效的方法。     

Hermes: Data Web search on a pay-as-you-go integration infrastructure

The Web as a global information space is developing from a Web of documents to a Web of data. This development opens new ways for addressing complex information needs. Search is no longer limited to matching keywords against documents, but instead complex information needs can be expressed in a structured way, with precise answers as results. In this paper, we present Hermes, an infrastructure for data Web search that addresses a number of challenges involved in realizing search on the data Web. To provide an end-user oriented interface, we support expressive user information needs by translating keywords into structured queries. We integrate heterogeneous Web data sources with automatically computed mappings. Schema-level mappings are exploited in constructing structured queries against the integrated schema. These structured queries are decomposed into queries against the local Web data sources, which are then processed in a distributed way. Finally, heterogeneous result sets are combined using an algorithm called map join, making use of data-level mappings. In evaluation experiments with real life data sets from the data Web, we show the practicability and scalability of the Hermes infrastructure.     

Answering content and structure-based queries on XML documents using relevance propagation

As XML documents contain both content and structure information, taking advantage of the document structure in the retrieval process can lead to better identify relevant information units. In this paper, we describe an information retrieval (IR) approach dealing with queries composed of content and structure conditions. The XFIRM model we propose is designed to be as flexible as possible to process such queries. It is based on a complete query language, derived from XPath and on a relevance values propagation method. This paper aims at evaluating functions used in the propagation process, and particularly the use of distance between nodes as a parameter. The proposed method is evaluated, thanks to the INEX evaluation initiative. Results show a relative high precision of our proposal.     

An efficient inverted index technique for XML documents using RDBMS

The inverted index is widely used in the existing information retrieval field. In order to support containment queries for structured documents such as XML, it needs to be extended. Previous work suggested an extension in storing the inverted index for XML documents and processing containment queries, and compared two implementation options: using an RDBMS and using an Information Retrieval (IR) engine. However, the previous work has two drawbacks in extending the inverted index. One is that the RDBMS implementation is generally much worse in the performance than the IR engine implementation. The other is that when a containment query is processed in an RDBMS, the number of join operations increases in proportion to the number of containment relationships in the query and a join operation always occurs between large relations. In order to solve these problems, we propose in this paper a novel approach to extend the inverted index for containment query processing, and show its effectiveness through experimental results. In particular, our performance study shows that (1) our RDBMS approach almost always outperforms the previous RDBMS and IR approaches, (2) our RDBMS approach is not far behind our IR approach with respect to performance, and (3) our approach is scalable to the number of containment relationships in queries. Therefore, our results suggest that, without having to make any modifications on the RDBMS engine, a native implementation using an RDBMS can support containment queries as efficiently as an IR implementation.