A Context-Sensitive Approach for Web Database Query Results Ranking

To deal with the problem of too many results returned from a Web database in response to a user query, this paper proposes a novel approach, which takes advantage of the contextual preferences to precompute a few representative orders of tuples and uses them to expeditiously provide ranked answers factoring in the information contained in the query. Contextual preferences take the form that item i₁ is preferred to item i₂ with an interest degree in the context of X. This paper formally defines contextual preferences, provides algorithms for creating tuple orders, clustering orders and processing queries, and presents experimental results to show their efficiency.