We investigate the problem of learning XML queries, path queries and tree pattern queries, from examples given by the user. A learning algorithm takes on the input a set of XML documents with nodes annotated by the user and returns a query that selects the nodes in a manner consistent with the annotation. We study two learning settings that differ with the types of annotations. In the first setting the user may only indicate required nodes that the query must return. In the second, more general, setting, the user may also indicate forbidden nodes that the query must not return. The query may or may not return any node with no annotation. We formalize what it means for a class of queries to be . One requirement is the existence of a learning algorithm that is sound i.e., always returns a query consistent with the examples given by the user. Furthermore, the learning algorithm should be complete i.e., able to produce every query with a sufficiently rich example. Other requirements involve tractability of learning and its robustness to nonessential examples. We show that the classes of simple path queries and path-subsumption-free tree queries are learnable from positive examples. The learnability of the full class of tree pattern queries (and the full class of path queries) remains an open question. We show also that adding negative examples to the picture renders the learning unfeasible. Published in ICDT 2012, Berlin.
XLearner @cite_26 is a practical system that infers XQuery programs. It uses Angluin’s DFA inference algorithm @cite_34 to construct the XPath components of the XQuery program. The system uses direct user interaction, essentially equivalence and membership queries, to refine the inferred query. Because of that the learning framework, called the @cite_34 , is different from ours and allows to infer more powerful queries. We also point out that learning twigs is not feasible with equivalence queries only @cite_21 .
@cite_26 @cite_21 @cite_34
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We present XLearner, a novel tool that helps the rapid development of XML mapping queries written in XQuery. XLearner is novel in that it learns XQuery queries consistent with given examples (fragments) of intended query results. XLearner combines known learning techniques, incorporates mechanisms to cope with issues specific to the XQuery learning context, and provides a systematic way for the semiautomatic development of queries. We describe the XLearner system. It presents algorithms for learning various classes of XQuery, shows that a minor extension gives the system a practical expressive power, and reports experimental results to demonstrate how XLearner outputs reasonably complicated queries with only a small number of interactions with the user. Queries submitted to a retrieval system are often ambiguous. In such a situation, a sensible strategy is to diversify the ranking of results to be retrieved, in the hope that users will find at least one of these results to be relevant to their information need. In this paper, we introduce xQuAD, a novel framework for search result diversification that builds such a diversified ranking by explicitly accounting for the relationship between documents retrieved for the original query and the possible aspects underlying this query, in the form of sub-queries. We evaluate the effectiveness of xQuAD using a standard TREC collection. The results show that our framework markedly outperforms state-of-the-art diversification approaches under a simulated best-case scenario. Moreover, we show that its effectiveness can be further improved by estimating the relative importance of each identified sub-query. Finally, we show that our framework can still outperform the simulated best-case scenario of the state-of-the-art diversification approaches using sub-queries automatically derived from the baseline document ranking itself. We address the problem of querying XML data over a P2P network. In P2P networks, the allowed kinds of queries are usually exact-match queries over file names. We discuss the extensions needed to deal with XML data and XPath queries. A single peer can hold a whole document or a partial complete fragment of the latter. Each XML fragment document is identified by a distinct path expression, which is encoded in a distributed hash table. Our framework differs from content-based routing mechanisms, biased towards finding the most relevant peers holding the data. We perform fragments placement and enable fragments lookup by solely exploiting few path expressions stored on each peer. By taking advantage of quasi-zero replication of global catalogs, our system supports fast full and partial XPath querying. To this purpose, we have extended the Chord simulator and performed an experimental evaluation of our approach. When users issue a query to a database, they have expectations about the results. If what they search for is unavailable in the database, the system will return an empty result or, worse, erroneous mismatch results. We call this problem the MisMatch problem. In this paper, we solve the MisMatch problem in the context of XML keyword search. Our solution is based on two novel concepts that we introduce: target node type and Distinguishability. Target Node Type represents the type of node a query result intends to match, and Distinguishability is used to measure the importance of the query keywords. Using these concepts, we develop a low-cost post-processing algorithm on the results of query evaluation to detect the MisMatch problem and generate helpful suggestions to users. Our approach has three noteworthy features: (1) for queries with the MisMatch problem, it generates the explanation, suggested queries and their sample results as the output to users, helping users judge whether the MisMatch problem is solved without reading all query results; (2) it is portable as it can work with any lowest common ancestor-based matching semantics (for XML data without ID references) or minimal Steiner tree-based matching semantics (for XML data with ID references) which return tree structures as results. It is orthogonal to the choice of result retrieval method adopted; (3) it is lightweight in the way that it occupies a very small proportion of the whole query evaluation time. Extensive experiments on three real datasets verify the effectiveness, efficiency and scalability of our approach. A search engine called XClear has been built and is available at http: xclear.comp.nus.edu.sg.