Title
Effective keyword search in relational databases
Abstract
With the amount of available text data in relational databases growing rapidly, the need for ordinary users to search such information is dramatically increasing. Even though the major RDBMSs have provided full-text search capabilities, they still require users to have knowledge of the database schemas and use a structured query language to search information. This search model is complicated for most ordinary users. Inspired by the big success of information retrieval (IR) style keyword search on the web, keyword search in relational databases has recently emerged as a new research topic. The differences between text databases and relational databases result in three new challenges: (1) Answers needed by users are not limited to individual tuples, but results assembled from joining tuples from multiple tables are used to form answers in the form of tuple trees. (2) A single score for each answer (i.e. a tuple tree) is needed to estimate its relevance to a given query. These scores are used to rank the most relevant answers as high as possible. (3) Relational databases have much richer structures than text databases. Existing IR strategies to rank relational outputs are not adequate. In this paper, we propose a novel IR ranking strategy for effective keyword search. We are the first that conducts comprehensive experiments on search effectiveness using a real world database and a set of keyword queries collected by a major search company. Experimental results show that our strategy is significantly better than existing strategies. Our approach can be used both at the application level and be incorporated into a RDBMS to support keyword-based search in relational databases.
Year
DOI
Venue
2006
10.1145/1142473.1142536
SIGMOD Conference
Keywords
Field
DocType
search model,keyword search,effective keyword search,style keyword search,relational databases,major search company,full-text search capability,search effectiveness,keyword-based search,text databases,structured query language,relational database,information retrieval,structured data,data type
Data mining,Conjunctive query,Information retrieval,Relational database,Computer science,Full text search,Sargable,Search-oriented architecture,Relational database management system,Relational model,Concept search,Database
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
1-59593-434-0
160
5.82
References 
Authors
14
4
Search Limit
100160
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Fang Liu161128.69
Clement Yu21605.82
Weiyi Meng32722514.77
Abdur Chowdhury42013160.59