Chapter 4 : Query Languages
Baeza-Yates, 1999
Modern Information Retrieval
Outline
Keyword-Based Querying
Patten Matching
Structural Queries
Query Protocols
Trends and Research Issues
Keyword-Based Querying
A query is formulation of a user information need
Keyword-based queries are popular
1. Single-Word Queries Data Retrieval
2. Context Queries
3. Boolean Queries
4. Natural Language Information Retrieval
Single-Word Queries
A query is formulated by a word
A document is formulated by long sequences of
words
A word is a sequence of letters surrounded by
separators
What are letters and separators? e.g,’on-line’
The division of the text into words is not
arbitrary
Context Queries
Definition
- Search words in a given context
Types
Phrase
>a sequence of single-word queries
>e.g, enhance retrieval
Proximity
>a sequence of single words or phrases, and a maximum
allowed distance between them are specified
>e.g,within distance (enhance, retrieval, 4) will match
‘…enhance the power of retrieval…’
Boolean Queries
Definition
A syntax composed of atoms that retrieve documents, and of
Boolean operators which work on their operands
e.g, translation AND syntax OR syntactic
Fuzzy Boolean
Retrieve documents appearing in some operands (The AND
may require it to appear in more operands than the OR)
Natural Language
Generalization of “fuzzy Boolean”
A query is an enumeration of words and context
queries
All the documents matching a portion of the user
query are retrieved
Pattern Matching
Data retrieval
A pattern is a set of syntactic features that must
occur in a text segment
Types
Words
Prefixes
e.q ‘comput’->’computer’ ,’computation’,’computing’,etc
Suffixes
e.q ‘ters’->’computers’,’testers’,’painters’,etc
Substrings
e.q ‘tal’->’coastal’,’talk’,’metallic’,etc
Ranges
between ‘held’ and ‘hold’->’hoax’ and ‘hissing’
Allowing errors
Retrieve all text words which all ‘similar’ to the
given word
edit distance:
the minimum number of character insertions,
deletions, and replacements needed to make two
strings equal, e.q , ‘flower’ and ‘flo wer’
maximum allowed edit distance:
query specifies the maximum number of allowed
errors for a word to match the pattern
Regular expressions
union: if e1 and e2 are regular expressions , then(e1|e2)
matches what e1 or e2 matches
concatenation: if e1 and e2 are regular expressions, the
occurrences of (e1e2) are formed by the occurrences of e1
immediately followed by those of e2
repetition: if e is a regular expression , then (e*)
matches a sequence of zero or more contiguous
occurrence of e
‘pro(blem|tein)(s|є)(0|1|2)*’->’problem2’ and
‘proteins’
Structural Queries
Mixing contents and structure in queries
- contents: words, phrases, or patterns
- structural constraints: containment, proximity,
or other restrictions on structural elements
Three main structures
- Fixed structure
- Hypertext structure
- Hierarchical structure
Fixed Structure
Document:a fixed set of fields
EX: a mail has a sender, a receiver, a date, a subject and a body field
Search for the mails sent to a given person with “football” in the
Subject field
Hypertext
A hypertext is a directed graph where nodes hold some
text (text contents)
the links represent connections between nodes or
between positions inside nodes (structural connectivity)
Hypertext : WebGlimpse
WebGlimpse: combine browsing and searching on
the Web
Hierarchical Structure
Hierarchical Structure
Hierarchical Structure
PAT Expressions
Overlapped Lists
Lists of References
Proximal Nodes
Tree Matching
Query Protocols
Z39.50
WAIS (Wide Area Information Service)
Z39.50
American National Standard Information
Retrieval Application Service Definition
Can be implemented on any platform
Query bibliographical information using a
standard interface between the client and the
host database manager
Z39.50 protocol is part of WAIS
Z39.50 Brief history
Z39.50-1988(version 1)
Z39.50-1992(version 2)
Z39.50-1995(version 3)
Version 4, development began in Autumn 1995
Using Z39.50 over the WWW
WWW Client WWW Z39.50
Z39.50 Repository
Server Digital library
Z39.50 Client
WAIS (Wide Area Information Service)
Beginning in the 1990s
Query databases through the Internet
Trends and Research Issues
Model Queries allowed
Boolean word,set operations
Vector words
Probabilistic words
BBN words
Relationship between types of queries and models
Query Language Taxonomy
The types of queries covered and how they are structured
PAT Tree Expression
The model allow for the areas of a region to
overlap or nest
Overlapped Lists
The model allow for the areas of a region to
overlap, but not to nest
It is not clear, whether overlapping is good or
not for capturing the structural properties
Lists of References
Overlap and nest are not allowed
All elements must be of the same type,e.g only
sections, or only paragraphs.
A reference is a pointer to a region of the
database.
Proximal Nodes
This model tries to find a good compromise
between expressiveness and efficiency.
It does not define a specific language, but a
model in which it is shown that a number of
useful operators can be included achieving good
efficiency.
Tree Matching
The leaves of the query can be not only
structural elements but also text patterns,
meaning that the ancestor of the leaf must
contain that pattern.