针对XML文档集的关键词检索结果排序

探讨了针对XML文档集中只与内容相关的关键词检索结果的排序问题,针对XML文档特征提出了一种新的排序模型,它不同于面向Web的XML网页的搜索结果的排序。设计了满足这种排序模型的倒排列表索引结构和搜索引擎的体系结构。     

Finding and ranking compact connected trees for effective keyword proximity search in XML documents

In this paper, we study the problem of keyword proximity search in XML documents. We take the disjunctive semantics among the keywords into consideration and find top-k relevant compact connected trees (CCTrees) as the answers of keyword proximity queries. We first introduce the notions of compact lowest common ancestor (CLCA) and maximal CLCA (MCLCA), and then propose compact connected trees and maximal CCTrees (MCCTrees) to efficiently and effectively answer keyword proximity queries. We give the theoretical upper bounds of the numbers of CLCAs, MCLCAs, CCTrees and MCCTrees, respectively. We devise an efficient algorithm to generate all MCCTrees, and propose a ranking mechanism to rank MCCTrees. Our extensive experimental study shows that our method achieves both high efficiency and effectiveness, and outperforms existing state-of-the-art approaches significantly.     

Keyword proximity search in XML trees

Recent works have shown the benefits of keyword proximity search in querying XML documents in addition to text documents. For example, given query keywords over Shakespeare's plays in XML, the user might be interested in knowing how the keywords cooccur. In this paper, we focus on XML trees and define XML keyword, proximity queries to return the (possibly heterogeneous) set of minimum connecting trees (MCTs) of the matches to the individual keywords in the query. We consider efficiently executing keyword proximity queries on labeled trees (XML) in various settings: 1) when the XML database has been preprocessed and 2) when no indices are available on the XML database. We perform a detailed experimental evaluation to study the benefits of our approach and show that our algorithms considerably outperform prior algorithms and other applicable approaches.     

Efficient keyword search over virtual XML views

Emerging applications such as personalized portals, enterprise search, and web integration systems often require keyword search over semi-structured views. However, traditional information retrieval techniques are likely to be expensive in this context because they rely on the assumption that the set of documents being searched is materialized. In this paper, we present a system architecture and algorithm that can efficiently evaluate keyword search queries over virtual (unmaterialized) XML views. An interesting aspect of our approach is that it exploits indices present on the base data and thereby avoids materializing large parts of the view that are not relevant to the query results. Another feature of the algorithm is that by solely using indices, we can still score the results of queries over the virtual view, and the resulting scores are the same as if the view was materialized. Our performance evaluation using the INEX data set in the Quark (Bhaskar et al. in Quark: an efficient XQuery full-text implementation. In: SIGMOD, 2006) open-source XML database system indicates that the proposed approach is scalable and efficient.     

Adaptive relaxation for querying heterogeneous XML data sources

Searching XML data with a structured XML query can improve the precision of results compared with a keyword search. However, the structural heterogeneity of the large number of XML data sources makes it difficult to answer the structured query exactly. As such, query relaxation is necessary. Previous work on XML query relaxation poses the problem of unnecessary computation of a big number of unqualified relaxed queries. To address this issue, we propose an adaptive relaxation approach which relaxes a query against different data sources differently based on their conformed schemas. In this paper, we present a set of techniques that supports this approach, which includes schema-aware relaxation rules for relaxing a query adaptively, a weighted model for ranking relaxed queries, and algorithms for adaptive relaxation of a query and top-k query processing. We discuss results from a comprehensive set of experiments that show the effectiveness and the efficiency of our approach.     

Top-k-size keyword search on tree structured data

Keyword search is the most popular technique for querying large tree-structured datasets, often of unknown structure, in the web. Recent keyword search approaches return lowest common ancestors (LCAs) of the keyword matches ranked with respect to their relevance to the keyword query. A major challenge of a ranking approach is the efficiency of its algorithms as the number of keywords and the size and complexity of the data increase. To face this challenge most of the known approaches restrict their ranking to a subset of the LCAs (e.g., SLCAs, ELCAs), missing relevant results.In this work, we design novel top-k-size stack-based algorithms on tree-structured data. Our algorithms implement ranking semantics for keyword queries which is based on the concept of LCA size. Similar to metric selection in information retrieval, LCA size reflects the proximity of keyword matches in the data tree. This semantics does not rank a predefined subset of LCAs and through a layered presentation of results, it demonstrates improved effectiveness compared to previous relevant approaches. To address performance challenges our algorithms exploit a lattice of the partitions of the keyword set, which empowers a linear time performance. This result is obtained without the support of auxiliary precomputed data structures. An extensive experimental study on various and large datasets confirms the theoretical analysis. The results show that, in contrast to other approaches, our algorithms scale smoothly when the size of the dataset and the number of keywords increase.     

Structural consistency: enabling XML keyword search to eliminate spurious results consistently

XML keyword search is a user-friendly way to query XML data using only keywords. In XML keyword search, to achieve high precision without sacrificing recall, it is important to remove spurious results not intended by the user. Efforts to eliminate spurious results have enjoyed some success using the concepts of LCA or its variants, SLCA and MLCA. However, existing methods still could find many spurious results. The fundamental cause for the occurrence of spurious results is that the existing methods try to eliminate spurious results locally without global examination of all the query results and, accordingly, some spurious results are not consistently eliminated. In this paper, we propose a novel keyword search method that removes spurious results consistently by exploiting the new concept of structural consistency. We define structural consistency as a property that is preserved if there is no query result having an ancestor-descendant relationship at the schema level with any other query results. A naive solution to obtain structural consistency would be to compute all the LCAs (or variants) and then to remove spurious results according to structural consistency. Obviously, this approach would always be slower than existing LCA-based ones. To speed up structural consistency checking, we must be able to examine the query results at the schema level without generating all the LCAs. However, this is a challenging problem since the schema-level query results do not homomorphically map to the instance-level query results, causing serious false dismissal. We present a comprehensive and practical solution to this problem and formally prove that this solution preserves structural consistency at the schema level without incurring false dismissal. We also propose a relevance-feedback-based solution for the problem where our method has low recall, which occurs when it is not the user’s intention to find more specific results. This solution has been prototyped in a full-fledged object-relational DBMS Odysseus developed at KAIST. Experimental results using real and synthetic data sets show that, compared with the state-of-the-art methods, our solution significantly (1) improves precision while providing comparable recall for most queries and (2) enhances the query performance by removing spurious results early.     

ELCA evaluation for keyword search on probabilistic XML data

As probabilistic data management is becoming one of the main research focuses and keyword search is turning into a more popular query means, it is natural to think how to support keyword queries on probabilistic XML data. With regards to keyword query on deterministic XML documents, ELCA (Exclusive Lowest Common Ancestor) semantics allows more relevant fragments rooted at the ELCAs to appear as results and is more popular compared with other keyword query result semantics (such as SLCAs). In this paper, we investigate how to evaluate ELCA results for keyword queries on probabilistic XML documents. After defining probabilistic ELCA semantics in terms of possible world semantics, we propose an approach to compute ELCA probabilities without generating possible worlds. Then we develop an efficient stack-based algorithm that can find all probabilistic ELCA results and their ELCA probabilities for a given keyword query on a probabilistic XML document. Finally, we experimentally evaluate the proposed ELCA algorithm and compare it with its SLCA counterpart in aspects of result probability, time and space efficiency, and scalability.     

An effective 3-in-1 keyword search method over heterogeneous data sources

Conventional keyword search engines are restricted to a given data model and cannot easily adapt to unstructured, semi-structured or structured data. In this paper, we propose an efficient and adaptive keyword search method, called EASE, for indexing and querying large collections of heterogeneous data. To achieve high efficiency in processing keyword queries, we first model unstructured, semi-structured and structured data as graphs, and then summarize the graphs and construct graph indices instead of using traditional inverted indices. We propose an extended inverted index to facilitate keyword-based search, and present a novel ranking mechanism for enhancing search effectiveness. We have conducted an extensive experimental study using real datasets, and the results show that EASE achieves both high search efficiency and high accuracy, and outperforms the existing approaches significantly.     

模糊XML关键字近似查询方法研究

在精确XML文档上的关键字查询方法的研究大多是基于LCA语义或者其变种语义(SLCA,ELCA等)开展的,将包含所有关键字的最紧致XML子树片段作为查询结果返回。但是这些基于LCA语义产生的查询结果中通常包含了大量的冗余信息,现实世界中存在着大量的不确定和模糊信息,因而如何从模糊XML文档中搜索到高质量的关键字查询结果是一个需要研究的问题。针对模糊XML文档上的关键字近似查询方法进行研究,通过引入最小连接树(MCT)的概念,提出在模糊XML文档上关键字查询的所有GDMCTs问题,并给出解决这一问题的基于栈的算法All fuzzy GDMCTs,该算法可以得到满足用户指定的子树大小阈值和可能性阈值条件的所有GDMCTs结果。实验表明,该算法在模糊XML文档上能够得到较高质量的关键字查询结果。     

Providing built-in keyword search capabilities in RDBMS

A common approach to performing keyword search over relational databases is to find the minimum Steiner trees in database graphs transformed from relational data. These methods, however, are rather expensive as the minimum Steiner tree problem is known to be NP-hard. Further, these methods are independent of the underlying relational database management system (RDBMS), thus cannot benefit from the capabilities of the RDBMS. As an alternative, in this paper we propose a new concept called Compact Steiner Tree (CSTree), which can be used to approximate the Steiner tree problem for answering top-k keyword queries efficiently. We propose a novel structure-aware index, together with an effective ranking mechanism for fast, progressive and accurate retrieval of top-k highest ranked CSTrees. The proposed techniques can be implemented using a standard relational RDBMS to benefit from its indexing and query-processing capability. We have implemented our techniques in MYSQL, which can provide built-in keyword-search capabilities using SQL. The experimental results show a significant improvement in both search efficiency and result quality comparing to existing state-of-the-art approaches.     

Context-Sensitive Document Ranking

Ranking is a main research issue in IR-styled keyword search over a set of documents. In this paper, we study a new keyword search problem, called context-sensitive document ranking, which is to rank documents with an additional context that provides additional information about the application domain where the documents are to be searched and ranked. The work is motivated by the fact that additional information associated with the documents can possibly assist users to find more relevant documents when the...     

Coding-based Join Algorithms for Structural Queries on Graph-Structured XML Document

In many applications, XML documents need to be modelled as graphs. The query processing of graph-structured XML documents brings new challenges. In this paper, we design a method based on labelling scheme for structural queries processing on graph-structured XML documents. We give each node some labels, the reachability labelling scheme. By extending an interval-based reachability labelling scheme for DAG by Rakesh et al., we design labelling schemes to support the judgements of reachability relationships for general graphs. Based on the labelling schemes, we design graph structural join algorithms to answer the structural queries with only ancestor-descendant relationship efficiently. For the processing of subgraph query, we design a subgraph join algorithm. With efficient data structure, the subgraph join algorithm can process subgraph queries with various structures efficiently. Experimental results show that our algorithms have good performance and scalability. Support by the Key Program of the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No.60533110; the National Grand Fundamental Research 973 Program of China under Grant No. 2006CB303000; the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 60773068 and No. 60773063.     

基于对抗式数据增强的深度文本检索重排序

在信息检索领域的排序任务中, 神经网络排序模型已经得到广泛使用. 神经网络排序模型对于数据的质量要求极高, 但是, 信息检索数据集通常含有较多噪音, 不能精确得到与查询不相关的文档. 为了训练一个高性能的神经网络排序模型, 获得高质量的负样本, 则至关重要. 借鉴现有方法doc2query的思想, 本文提出了深度、端到端的模型AQGM, 通过学习不匹配查询文档对, 生成与文档不相关、原始查询相似的对抗查询, 增加了查询的多样性,增强了负样本的质量. 本文利用真实样本和AQGM模型生成的样本, 训练基于BERT的深度排序模型, 实验表明,与基线模型BERT-base对比, 本文的方法在MSMARCO和TrecQA数据集上, MRR指标分别提升了0.3％和3.2％.     

Keyword query with structure: towards semantic scoring of XML search results

Keyword search is an effective paradigm for information discovery and has been introduced recently to query XML documents. Scoring of XML search results is an important issue in XML keyword search. Traditional “bag-of-words” model cannot differentiate the roles of keywords as well as the relationship between keywords, thus is not proper for XML keyword queries. In this paper, we present a new scoring method based on a novel query model, called keyword query with structure (QWS), which is specially designed for XML keyword query. The method is based on a totally new view taken by the QWS model on a keyword query that, a keyword query is a composition of several query units, each representing a query condition. We believe that this method captures the semantic relevance of the search results. The paper first introduces an algorithm reformulating a keyword query to a QWS. Then, a scoring method is presented which measures the relevance of search results according to how many and how well the query conditions are matched. The scoring method is also extended to clusters of search results. Experimental results verify the effectiveness of our methods.     

XBridge-Mobile: efficient XML keyword search on mobile web data

Mobile computing over intelligent mobile is affecting human’s habits of obtaining information over Internet, especially keyword search. Most of previous keyword search works are mainly focused on traditional web data sources, in which the performance can be improved by adding more computing power and/or building more offline-computed index. However, it is very challenging to apply the traditional keyword search methods to mobile web-based keyword search because mobile computing has many different features, e.g., frequent disconnections, variety of bandwidths, limited power of mobile devices, limited data size to be downloaded, etc.. To address this challenge, in this paper we design an adaptive mobile-based XML keyword search approach, called XBridge-Mobile, that can derive the semantics of a keyword query and generate a set of effective structured patterns by analyzing the given keyword query and the schemas of XML data sources. Each structured pattern represents one of user’s possible search intentions. The patterns will be firstly sent to the mobile client from web server. And then, the mobile client can select some interested patterns to load the results. By doing this, we can reduce the communication cost a lot between web server and mobile client because only the derived patterns and a few results need to be transferred, not all the keyword search results, by which we can save lots of expenses when the downloaded data is priced. In addition, we can economically maintain the frequent structured pattern queries in the mobile device, which can further reduce the expense of downloading data. At last, we analyze and propose a ranking function to measure the quality of keyword search results, design a set of algorithms to optimize mobile keyword search based on the maintained structured patterns, and present the experimental study of XBridge-Mobile with real XML datasets.     

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.     

XML structural delta mining: Issues and challenges

Recently, there is an increasing research efforts in XML data mining. These research efforts largely assumed that XML documents are static. However, in reality, the documents are rarely static. In this paper, we propose a novel research problem called XML structural delta mining. The objective of XML structural delta mining is to discover knowledge by analyzing structural evolution pattern (also called structural delta) of history of XML documents. Unlike existing approaches, XML structural delta mining focuses on the dynamic and temporal features of XML data. Furthermore, the data source for this novel mining technique is a sequence of historical versions of an XML document rather than a set of snapshot XML documents. Such mining technique can be useful in many applications such as change detection for very large XML documents, efficient XML indexing, XML search engine, etc. Our aim in this paper is not to provide a specific solution to a particular mining problem. Rather, we present the vision of the mining framework and present the issues and challenges for three types of XML structural delta mining: identifying various interesting structures, discovering association rules from structural deltas, and structural change pattern-based classification.     

Precision Evaluation of Search Engines

In this paper, we present a general approach for statistically evaluating precision of search engines on the Web. Search engines are evaluated in two steps based on a large number of sample queries: (a) computing relevance scores of hits from each search engine, and (b) ranking the search engines based on statistical comparison of the relevance scores. In computing relevance scores of hits, we study four relevance scoring algorithms. Three of them are variations of algorithms widely used in the traditional information retrieval field. They are cover density ranking, Okapi similarity measurement, and vector space model algorithms. In addition, we develop a new three-level scoring algorithm to mimic commonly used manual approaches. In ranking the search engines in terms of precision, we apply a statistical metric called probability of win. In our experiments, six popular search engines, AltaVista, Fast, Google, Go, iWon, and NorthernLight, were evaluated based on queries from two domains of interest: parallel and distributed processing, and knowledge and data engineering. The first query set contains 1726 queries collected from the index terms of papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering. The second set contains 1383 queries collected from the index terms of papers published in the IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems. Search engines were queried and compared in two different search modes: the default search mode and the exact phrase search mode. Our experimental results show that these six search engines performed differently under different search modes and scoring methods. Overall, Google was the best. NorthernLight was mostly second in the default search mode, whereas iWon was mostly second in the exact phrase search mode.     

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。