Similarity search for office XML documents based on style and structure data

Office documents are widely used in our daily activities, so the number of them has been increasing. A demand for sophisticated search for office documents becomes more important. The recent file format of office documents is based on a package of multiple XML files. These XML files include not only body text but also page structure data and style data. The purpose of this paper is to utilize them to find similar office documents.

The authors propose SOS, a similarity search method based on structures and styles of office documents. SOS needs to compute similarity values between multiple pairs of XML files included in the office documents. We also propose LAX+, which is an algorithm to calculate a similarity value for a pair of XML files, by extending existing XML leaf node clustering algorithm.

SOS and LAX+ are evaluated by using three types of office documents (docx, xlsx and pptx) in our experiments. The results of LAX+ and SOS are better than ones of the existing algorithms.

Existing text‐based search engines do not take structure and style of documents into account. SOS can find similar documents by calculating similarities between multiple XML files corresponding to body texts, structures and styles.