Efficient parsing-based search over structured data

Abstract

Parsing-based search, i.e., parsing keyword search queries using grammars, is often used to override the traditional "bag-of-words'" semantics in web search and enterprise search scenarios. Compared to the "bag-of-words" semantics, the parsing-based semantics is richer and more customizable. While a formalism for parsing-based semantics for keyword search has been proposed in prior work and ad-hoc implementations exist, the problem of designing efficient algorithms to support the semantics is largely unstudied. In this paper, we present a suite of efficient algorithms and auxiliary indexes for this problem. Our algorithms work for a broad classes of grammars used in practice, and cover a variety of database matching functions (set- and substring-containment, approximate and exact equality) and scoring functions (to filter and rank different parses). We formally analyze the time complexity of our algorithms and provide an empirical evaluation over real-world data to show that our algorithms scale well with the size of the database and grammar.