Finding Syntactic Similarities Between XML Documents

Detecting structural similarities between XML documents has been the subject of several recent work, and the proposed algorithms mostly use tree edit distance between the corresponding trees of XML documents. However, evaluating a tree edit distance is computationally expensive and does not easily scale up to large collections. We show in this paper that a tree edit distance computation often is not necessary and can be avoided. In particular, we propose a concise structural summary of XML documents and show that a comparison based on this summary is both fast and effective. Our experimental evaluation shows that this method does an excellent job of grouping documents generated by the same DTD, outperforming some of the previously proposed solutions based on a tree comparison. Furthermore, the time complexity of the algorithm is linear on the size of the structural description