Context-based diversification for keyword queries over XML data

While keyword query empowers ordinary users to search vast amount of data, the ambiguity of keyword query makes it difficult to effectively answer keyword queries, especially for short and vague keyword queries. To address this challenging problem, in this paper we propose an approach that automatically diversifies XML keyword search based on its different contexts in the XML data. Given a short and vague keyword query and XML data to be searched, we first derive keyword search candidates of the query by a simple feature selection model. And then, we design an effective XML keyword search diversification model to measure the quality of each candidate. After that, two efficient algorithms are proposed to incrementally compute top-k qualified query candidates as the diversified search intentions. Two selection criteria are targeted: the k selected query candidates are most relevant to the given query while they have to cover maximal number of distinct results. At last, a comprehensive evaluation on real and synthetic data sets demonstrates the effectiveness of our proposed diversification model and the efficiency of our algorithms.