BACKGROUND PubMed is the largest biomedical bibliographic information source on the Internet. PubMed has been considered one of the most important and reliable sources of up-to-date health care evidence. Previous studies examined the effects of domain expertise/knowledge on search performance using PubMed. However, very little is known about PubMed users' knowledge of information retrieval (IR)...

Integration systems typically support only a limited set of queries over the schema they export. The reason is that the participating information sources contribute limited content and limited access methods. In prior work, this query set has often been described using a set of views. We describe the CLIDE interactive system, which extends the QBE-like query builder of Microsoft’s SQL Server wi...

Data retrieval finding relevant data from large databases — has become a serious problem as myriad databases have been brought online in the Web. For instance, querying the for-sale houses in Chicago from realtor.com returns thousands of matching houses. Similarly, querying ‘‘digital camera’’ in froogle.com returns hundreds of thousand of results. This data retrieval is essentially an online ra...

Recent literature on “search database systems” has introduced the notion of using query rewrite rules to influence the behavior of a search engine. Rewrite rules enable domain experts and search administrators to customize the search engine by providing a powerful rule-driven framework to transform user search queries. In this paper, we address the important problem of automatically learning su...

The next generation of database management, directory browsing, information retrieval, hypermedia, scientific data management, and library systems can enable convenient exploration of growing information spaces by a wider range of users. User interface designers can provide more powerful search techniques, more comprehensible query facilities, better presentation methods, and smoother integrati...

Converting questions to effective queries is crucial to open-domain question answering systems. In this paper, we present a web-based unsupervised learning approach for transforming a given natural-language question to an effective query. The method involves querying a search engine for Web passages that contain the answer to the question, extracting patterns that characterize fine-grained clas...

The combination of data, semantics, and the Web has led to an ever growing and increasingly complex body of semantic data. Accessing such structured data requires learning formal query languages, such as SPARQL, which poses significant difficulties for nonexpert users. To date, many interfaces for querying Ontologies have been developed. However, such interfaces rely on predefined templates and...

The User-over-Ranking hypothesis states that the best retrieval performance can be achieved with queries returning about as many results as can be considered at user site [21]. We apply this hypothesis to Lee et al.’s problem of automatically formulating a single promising query from a given set of keywords [16]. Lee et al.’s original approach requires unrestricted access to the retrieval syste...

In semistructured databases there is no schema fixed in advance. To provide the benefits of a schema in such environments, we introduce DataGuides: concise and accurate structural summaries of semistructured databases. DataGuides serve as dynamic schemas, generated from the database; they are useful for browsing database structure, formulating queries, storing information such as statistics and...

This paper concentrates on experiments with automatic creation of queries from natural language topics, suitable for use in the Extended Boolean information retrieval system. Because of the lack and/or inadequacy of the available methods, we propose a new method, based on pairing terms into a binary tree structure. The results of this method are compared with the results achieved by our impleme...