XQSuggest: An interactive XML keyword search system

Abstract

Query suggestion is extensively used in web search engines to suggest relevant queries, which can help users better express their information needs. In this paper, we explore the application of query suggestion in xml keyword search and propose a novel interactive xml query system XQSuggest, which mainly targets non-professional users who roughly know the contents of the database. Our system extends conventional keyword search systems by instantly suggesting several understandable semantic strings after each keyword is typed in, so that the users can easily select their desired semantic string, which represents a specific meaning of the keyword, to replace the ambiguous keyword. We provide a novel algorithm to compute the final results. Experimental results are provided to verify the better effectiveness of our system. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.