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: h86940bd7bc111e65
Venue: SIGMOD
Year: 2014
Pagerank: 5.74194e-05
Overall Rank: 6,594 | 55.67%
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
1,318	LSH Ensemble: Internet-Scale Domain Search	2016	VLDB	0.00011047393
5,155	An In-Depth Benchmarking of Text-to-SQL Systems	2021	SIGMOD	6.250495e-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
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047394041
217	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB	0.00024465994
1,558	Summarizing Relational Databases	2009	VLDB	0.00010257165
2,731	Keyword Search in Graphs: Finding r-cliques	2011	VLDB	8.0838142e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	4,447	Keyword Search on Relational Data Streams	2007	SIGMOD
2	1,501	Keyword Search in Databases: The Power of RDBMS	2009	SIGMOD
3	5,845	Effective Keyword-based Selection of Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD
4	9,974	A Graph Method for Keyword-based Selection of the top-K Databases	2008	SIGMOD
5	9,098	Toward Scalable Keyword Search over Relational Data	2010	VLDB
6	9,413	Keyword Querying and Ranking in Databases	2009	VLDB
7	217	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB
8	3,312	Keyword Search on Structured and Semi-Structured Data	2009	SIGMOD
9	3,728	Keyword Search over Relational Databases: A Metadata Approach	2011	SIGMOD
10	768	Effective Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2006	SIGMOD