Reasoning and Identifying Relevant Matches for XML Keyword Search

Keyword search is a user-friendly mechanism for retrieving XML data in web and scientific applications. An intuitively compelling but vaguely defined goal is to identify matches to query keywords that are relevant to the user. However, it is hard to directly evaluate the relevance of query results due to the inherent ambiguity of search semantics. In this paper, the authors investigate an axiomatic framework that includes two intuitive and non-trivial properties that an XML keyword search technique should ideally satisfy: Monotonicity and consistency, with respect to data and query.