MeanKS: Meaningful Keyword Search in Relational Databases with Complex Schema

Summary: MeanKS enables meaningful keyword search in complex relational schemas by assigning keyword roles to capture user intent. It ranks join trees by schema-based relevance using relations and foreign-keys, not just answer size or content. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 4902
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 5.8380657e-05
Overall Rank: 6,567 | 54.95%
DOI: 10.1145/2588555.2594533

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Mehdi Kargar (York University)
2. Aijun An (York University)
3. Nick Cercone (York University)
4. Parke Godfrey (York University)
5. Jaroslaw Szlichta (University of Ontario Institute of Technology)
6. Xiaohui Yu (York University)

BibTeX Citation

@inproceedings{kargar_sigmod14,
        title = {{MeanKS: Meaningful Keyword Search in Relational Databases with Complex Schema}},
        author = {Kargar, Mehdi and An, Aijun and Cercone, Nick and Godfrey, Parke and Szlichta, Jaroslaw and Yu, Xiaohui},
        series = {{SIGMOD} '14},
        booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} International Conference on Management of Data},
        publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
        doi = {10.1145/2588555.2594533},
        url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2588555.2594533},
        year = {2014}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,495	LSH Ensemble: Internet-Scale Domain Search	2016	VLDB	0.00010571481
5,174	An In-Depth Benchmarking of Text-to-SQL Systems	2021	SIGMOD	6.3337874e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 4 of 4 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
37	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00048017193
212	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB	0.000247733
1,532	Summarizing Relational Databases	2009	VLDB	0.00010472227
2,691	Keyword Search in Graphs: Finding r-cliques	2011	VLDB	8.2499521e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,378	Keyword Search on Relational Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD
2	1,555	Keyword Search in Databases: The Power of RDBMS	2009	SIGMOD
3	5,732	Effective Keyword-based Selection of Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD
4	9,791	A Graph Method for Keyword-based Selection of the top-K Databases	2008	SIGMOD
5	8,936	Toward Scalable Keyword Search over Relational Data	2010	VLDB
6	9,239	Keyword Querying and Ranking in Databases	2009	VLDB
7	212	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB
8	3,239	Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data	2009	SIGMOD
9	3,651	Keyword Search over Relational Databases: A Metadata Approach	2011	SIGMOD
10	748	Effective Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2006	SIGMOD