Title:   A Logical Framework for XML Full-Text Search 
Speaker: Emiran Curtmola (UCSD)

Abstract:

The increase of large XML repositories being made available lately has 
created and determined the need to search both the structure and text 
content of XML documents. Several full-text query languages for XML 
have been proposed. Such languages allow to combine complex text 
search conditions with conditions on document structure.  For 
instance, a query can ask for 'all bills introduced by "Jefferson" 
with a committee name containing the words "workforce" (or its 
synonyms) and "education" (or its stemmed forms) at a distance no more 
than 5 words of each other'. A key challenge in processing these 
queries efficiently is to use structural relationships between nodes 
in the XML documents. 

We propose a formalization of XML full-text search queries and develop 
evaluation algorithms that account for document structure to optimize 
these queries. Our formalism captures most existing XML full-text 
search languages. We discuss the implementation of these algorithms 
inside GalaTex (http://www.galaxquery.com/galatex), our conformant 
implementation of XQuery Full-Text, a W3C extension of XPath/XQuery to 
support full-text queries on XML documents.