Theoretical results on keyword search and related problems

Keyword search has been extensively studied in the database area in the past decade. Indeed, scientists in this community have produced highly efficient systems to support keyword search in various applications, e.g., those on relational data, XML documents, spatial objects, to name only a few. Just like every other science subject, however, system work is no substitute for theoretical studies that aim at understanding the nature and hardness of keyword search, as well as their inter-connections to other relevant problems. In this talk, we will discuss theoretical results on several keyword search problems. As we will see, not surprisingly, progress in the theory field has lagged significantly behind the system frontier. The talk will also present some interesting open problems.