Chinese Keyword Search over Relational Databases

Based on a knowledge base, we propose a new method to realize free-style Chinese keyword search over relational databases. Firstly, an index (also called knowledge base) is built by extracting related information of Chinese tuple words in a database, then query words and tuple words are matched quickly each other by with the index to obtain some of candidate answers for a given query. Secondly, we present a new ranking strategy to compute similarities between the query and the candidate answers, and refine the candidate answers by a matching algorithm proposed in this paper. Finally, we rank refined candidate answers to obtain top-N results. The experiments are conducted using a real dataset, and the experimental results show that our method is efficient and effective.