Graph based Ranked Answers for Keyword Graph Structure

Keyword query processing over graph structured data is beneficial across various real world applications. The basic unit, of search and retrieval, in keyword search over graph, is a structure (interconnection of nodes) that connects all the query keywords. This new answering paradigm, in contrast to single web page results given by search engines, brings forth new challenges for ranking. In this paper, we propose a simple but effective Fuzzy set theory based Ranking measure, called FRank. Fuzzy sets acknowledge the contribution of each individual query keyword, discretely, to enumerate node relevance. A novel aggregation operator is defined, to combine the content relevance based fuzzy sets and, compute query dependent edge weights. The final rank, of an answer, is computed by non-monotonic addition of edge weights, as per their relevance to keyword query. FRank evaluates each answer based on the distribution of query keywords and structural connectivity between those keywords. An extensive empirical analysis shows superior performance by our proposed ranking measure as compared to the ranking measures adopted by current approaches in the literature.