Answering aggregate keyword queries on relational databases using minimal group-bys
Keyword search has been recently extended to relational databases to retrieve information from text-rich attributes. However, all the existing methods focus on finding individual tuples matching a set of query keywords from one table or the join of multiple tables. In this paper, we motivate a novel problem of aggregate keyword search: finding minimal group-bys covering a set of query keywords well, which is useful in many applications. We develop two interesting approaches to tackle the problem, and further extend our methods to allow partial matches. An extensive empirical evaluation using both real data sets and synthetic data sets is reported to verify the effectiveness of aggregate keyword search and the efficiency of our methods. Copyright 2009 ACM.
