Answering web queries using structured data sources

Abstract

In web search today, a user types a few keywords which are then matched against a large collection of unstructured web pages. This leaves a lot to be desired for when the best answer to a query is contained in structured data stores and/or when the user includes some structural semantics in the query. In our work, we include information from structured data sources into web results. Such sources can vary from fully relational DBs, to flat tables and XML files. In addition, we take advantage of information in such sources to automatically extract corresponding semantics from the query and use them appropriately in improving the overall relevance of results. For this demonstration, we show how we effectively capture, annotate and translate web user queries such as 'popular digital camera around $425' returning results from a shopping-like DB.