In this paper, we propose an IR-style approach which basically utilizes the statistics of underlying XML data to address these challenges. We first propose specific guidelines that a search engine should meet in both search intention identification and relevance oriented ranking for search results. Then based on these guidelines, we design novel formulae to identify the search for nodes and search via nodes of a query, and present a novel XML TF*IDF ranking strategy to rank the individual matches of all possible search intentions. Lastly, the proposed techniques are implemented in an XML keyword search engine called XReal, and extensive experiments show the effectiveness of our approach.

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Inspired by the great success of information retrieval (IR) style keyword search on the web, keyword search on XML has emerged recently. The difference between text database and XML database results in three new challenges: 1) Identify the user search intention, i.e., identify the XML node types that user wants to search for and search via. 2) Resolve keyword ambiguity problems: a keyword can appear as both a tag name and a text value of some node; a keyword can appear as the text values of different XML node types and carry different meanings; a keyword can appear as the tag name of different XML node types with different meanings. 3) As the search results are subtrees of the XML document, new scoring function is needed to estimate its relevance to a given query. However, existing methods cannot resolve these challenges, thus return low result quality in term of query relevance. In this paper, we propose an IR-style approach which basically utilizes the statistics of underlying XML data to address these challenges. We first propose specific guidelines that a search engine should meet in both search intention identification and relevance oriented ranking for search results. Then, based on these guidelines, we design novel formulae to identify the search for nodes and search via nodes of a query, and present a novel XML TF*IDF ranking strategy to rank the individual matches of all possible search intentions. To complement our result ranking framework, we also take the popularity into consideration for the results that have comparable relevance scores. Lastly, extensive experiments have been conducted to show the effectiveness of our approach.

Abstract-In this paper, we focus on efficient keyword query processing for XML data based on SLCA and ELCA semantics. We propose for each keyword a novel form of inverted list, which includes IDs of nodes that directly or indirectly contain the keyword. We propose a family of efficient algorithms that are based on the set intersection operation for both semantics. We show that the problem of SLCA/ELCA computation becomes finding a set of nodes that appear in all involved inverted lists and satisfy certain conditions. We also propose several optimization techniques to further improve the query processing performance. We have conducted extensive experiments with many alternative methods. The results demonstrate that our proposed methods outperform existing ones by up to two orders of magnitude in many cases.

Identifying the labels of points of interest (POIs), aka POI labelling, provides significant benefits in location-based services. However, the quality of raw labels manually added by users or generated by artificial algorithms cannot be guaranteed. Such low-quality labels decrease the usability and result in bad user experiences. In this paper, by observing that crowdsourcing is a best-fit for computer-hard tasks, we leverage crowdsourcing to improve the quality of POI labelling. To our best knowledge, this is the first work on crowdsourced POI labelling tasks. In particular, there are two sub-problems: (1) how to infer the correct labels for each POI based on workers' answers, and(2) how to effectively assign proper tasks to workers in order to make more accurate inference for next available workers. To address these two problems, we propose a framework consisting of an inference model and an online task assigner. The inference model measures the quality of a worker on a POI by elaborately exploiting (i) worker's inherent quality, (ii) the spatial distance between the worker and the POI, and (iii) the POI influence, which can provide reliable inference results once a worker submits an answer. As workers are dynamically coming, the online task assigner judiciously assigns proper tasks to them so as to benefit the inference. The inference model and task assigner work alternately to continuously improve the overall quality. We conduct extensive experiments on a real crowdsourcing platform, and the results on two real datasets show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches.