Searching web databases by structuring keyword-based queries Pável Calado, Altigran Soares da Silva, Rodrigo C. Vieira, Alberto H. F. Laender, and Berthier A. Ribeiro-Neto   View Paper (PDF)   Return to Web search 1 Abstract On-line information services have become widespread in the Web nowadays. However, Web users are non-specialized and have a great variety of interests. Thus, interfaces for Web databases must be simple and uniform. In this paper we present an approach, based on Bayesian networks, for querying Web databases using keywords only. According to this approach, the user inputs a query through a simple search-box interface. From the input query, one or more plausible structured queries are derived and submitted to Web databases. The results are then retrieved and presented to the user as ranked answers. Our approach reduces the complexity of existing on-line interfaces and offers a solution to the problem of querying several distinct Web databases with a single interface. The applicability of the proposed approach was demonstrated by experimental results with 3 databases, obtained with a prototype search system that implements it. We have found that from 77% to 95% of the time, one of the top three resulting structured queries is the proper one. Further, when the user selects one of these three top queries for processing, the ranked answers present average precision figures from 60% to about 100%. DiSC'03 © 2003 Association for Computing Machinery