TASM: Top-k Approximate Subtree Matching

Abstract-- We consider the Top-k Approximate Subtree Matching (TASM) problem: finding the k best matches of a small query tree, e.g., a DBLP article with 15 nodes, in a large document tree, e.g., DBLP with 26M nodes, using the canonical tree edit distance as a similarity measure between subtrees. Evaluating the tree edit distance for large XML trees is difficult: the best known algorithms have cubic runtime and quadratic space complexity, and, thus, do not scale. Our solution is TASMpostorder, a memory-efficient and scalable TASM algorithm. We prove an upper-bound for the maximum subtree size for which the tree edit distance needs to be evaluated. The upper bound depends on the query and is independent of the document size and structure. A core problem is to efficiently prune subtrees that are above this size threshold. We develop an algorithm based on the prefix ring buffer that allows us to prune all subtrees above the threshold in a single postorder scan of the document. The size of...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: ICDE
• Authors: Nikolaus Augsten, Denilson Barbosa, Michael H. Böhlen, Themis Palpanas
• Keywords: Database, ICDE 2010, Large Document Tree, Prefix Ring Buffer, Tree Edit Distance