The document proposes an approach called XReal to improve the effectiveness of XML keyword search by:
1. Identifying the user's desired search target and search criteria nodes in the XML data based on heuristics that consider the relatedness and informativeness of nodes.
2. Defining XML-specific term frequency (TF) and document frequency (DF) measures to extend the traditional TF-IDF model to the XML domain while accounting for hierarchical structure and semantics.
3. Designing a keyword search engine that ranks query results based on the proposed XML TF-IDF similarity measure to better capture user search intention and address keyword ambiguity issues.