Processing keyword search on XML: a survey

Keyword search is a user-friendly approach for users to retrieve information from XML data. Since an XML document can have a large size and contain a lot of information, an XML keyword search result should be a fragment of an XML document dynamically constructed at query time, which is achievable due to the structuredness of XML. Processing keyword searches on XML has several challenges, e.g., what are the elements in the XML document that are relevant to the query? How to generate the results efficiently and rank the results meaningfully? How to present the results to the user in a way such that the user can quickly find the desired information? In this survey, we review the papers in the literature that attempted to address these problems. We divide the existing approaches into several classes based on the problem they tackled, and perform a comprehensive analysis of these works.