FRIDAL: A Desktop Search System Based on Latent Interfile Relationships

Abstract

Desktop search is must-have features for modern operationg systems because retrieving desired files from massive amount of files is a major problem. Several desktop search tools using full-text search techniques have been developed. However, those files lacking any given keywords, such as picture files and the source data of experiments, cannot be found by tools based on full-text searches, even if they are related to the keywords. In this paper, we propose a search method based on latent interfile relationships derieved from file access logs. Our proposed method allows us retrieve files that lack keywords but do have an association with them, based on the concept that those files opened by a user in a particular time period are related. We have implemented a desktop search system “FRIDAL” based on the proposed method, and evaluated its effectiveness by experiment. The evaluation results indicate that the proposed method has superior precision and recall compared with full-text and directory-search methods.