Query by analogical example: relational search using web search engine indices

  • Authors:

  • Makoto P. Kato;Hiroaki Ohshima;Satoshi Oyama;Katsumi Tanaka

  • Affiliations:

  • Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan;Kyoto University, Kyoto, Japan

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 18th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

We describe methods to search with a query by example in a known domain for information in an unknown domain by exploiting Web search engines. Relational search is an effective way to obtain information in an unknown field for users. For example, if an Apple user searches for Microsoft products, similar Apple products are important clues for the search. Even if the user does not know keywords to search for specific Microsoft products, the relational search returns a product name by querying simply an example of Apple products. More specifically, given a tuple containing three terms, such as (Apple, iPod, Microsoft), the term Zune can be extracted from the Web search results, where Apple is to iPod what Microsoft is to Zune. As a previously proposed relational search requires a huge text corpus to be downloaded from the Web, the results are not up-to-date and the corpus has a high construction cost. We introduce methods for relational search by using Web search indices. We consider methods based on term co-occurrence, on lexico-syntactic patterns, and on combinations of the two approaches. Our experimental results showed that the combination methods got the highest precision, and clarified the characteristics of the methods.