Structural Consistency: Enabling XML Keyword Search to Eliminate Spurious Results Consistently

Abstract: 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 by 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.