Users are rarely familiar with the content of a data source they are
querying, and therefore cannot avoid using keywords that do not exist in the
data source. Traditional systems may respond with an empty result, causing
dissatisfaction, while the data source in effect holds semantically related
content. In this paper we study this no-but-semantic-match problem on XML
keyword search and propose a solution which enables us to present the top-k
semantically related results to the user. Our solution involves two steps: (a)
extracting semantically related candidate queries from the original query and
(b) processing candidate queries and retrieving the top-k semantically related
results. Candidate queries are generated by replacement of non-mapped keywords
with candidate keywords obtained from an ontological knowledge base. Candidate
results are scored using their cohesiveness and their similarity to the
original query. Since the number of queries to process can be large, with each
result having to be analyzed, we propose pruning techniques to retrieve the
top-k results efficiently. We develop two query processing algorithms based
on our pruning techniques. Further, we exploit a property of the candidate
queries to propose a technique for processing multiple queries in batch, which
improves the performance substantially. Extensive experiments on two real
datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed approaches.Comment: 24 pages, 21 figures, 6 tables, submitted to The VLDB Journal for
possible publicatio