Identifying meaningful return information for XML keyword search

Keyword search enables web users to easily access XML data without the need to learn a structured query language and to study possibly complex data schemas. Existing work has addressed the problem of selecting qualified data nodes that match keywords and connecting them in a meaningful way, in the spirit of inferring a where clause in XQuery. However, how to infer the return clause for keyword search is an open problem. To address this challenge, we present an XML keyword search engine, XSeek, to infer the semantics of the search and identify return nodes effectively. XSeek recognizes possible entities and attributes inherently represented in the data. It also distinguishes between search predicates and return specifications in the keywords. Then based on the analysis of both XML data structures and keyword match patterns, XSeek generates return nodes. Extensive experimental studies show the effectiveness of XSeek.