13-11-2012, 02:01 PM
Abstract on A Probabilistic Scheme for Keyword- Based Incremental Query Construction
ABSTRACT
Databases enable users to precisely express their
informational needs using structured queries. However,
database query construction is a laborious and errorprone
process, which cannot be performed well by most
end users. Keyword search alleviates the usability
problem at the price of query expressiveness. As
keyword search algorithms do not differentiate between
the possible informational needs represented by a
keyword query, users may not receive adequate results.
This paper presents IQP—a novel approach to bridge the
gap between usability of keyword search and
expressiveness of database queries. IQP enables a user to
start with an arbitrary keyword query and incrementally
refine it into a structured query through an interactive
interface. The enabling techniques of IQP include: 1) a
probabilistic framework for incremental query
construction; 2) a probabilistic model to assess the
possible informational needs represented by a keyword
query; 3) an algorithm to obtain the optimal query
construction process. This paper presents the detailed
design of IQP, and demonstrates its effectiveness and
scalability through experiments over real-world data and
a user study.