Effective keyword query processing with an extended answer structure in large graph databases

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Purpose – The paper aims to propose an effective method to process keyword-based queries over graph-structured databases which are widely used in various applications such as XML, semantic web, and social network services. To satisfy users' information need, it proposes an extended answer structure for keyword queries, inverted list indexes on keywords and nodes, and query processing algorithms exploiting the inverted lists. The study aims to provide more effective and relevant answers to a given query than the previous approaches in an efficient way. Design/methodology/approach – A new relevance measure for nodes to a given keyword query is defined in the paper and according to the relevance metric, a new answer tree structure is proposed which has no constraint on the number of keyword nodes chosen for each query keyword. For efficient query processing, an inverted list-style index is suggested which pre-computes connectivity and relevance information on the nodes in the graph. Then, a query processing algorithm based on the pre-constructed inverted lists is designed, which aggregates list entries for each graph node relevant to given keywords and identifies top-k root nodes of answer trees most relevant to the given query. The basic search method is also enhanced by using extend inverted lists which store additional relevance information of the related entries in the lists in order to estimate the relevance score of a node more closely and to find top-k answers more efficiently. Findings – Experiments with real datasets and various test queries were conducted for evaluating effectiveness and performance of the proposed methods in comparison with one of the previous approaches. The experimental results show that the proposed methods with an extended answer structure produce more effective top-k results than the compared previous method for most of the queries, especially for those with OR semantics. An extended inverted list and enhanced search algorithm are shown to achieve much improvement on the execution performance compared to the basic search method. Originality/value – This paper proposes a new extended answer structure and query processing scheme for keyword queries on graph databases which can satisfy the users' information need represented by a keyword set having various semantics.