Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study the spelling suggestion (SS) problem for extensible markup language (XML) keyword search, which provides users with alternative queries that may better express users search intention.

Design/methodology/approach – To return the suggested queries more efficiently, the authors evaluate the quality of the query by estimating the selectivity and quality of each query pattern. The selectivity estimation is based on the XSketch synopsis, which summarizes the structure and value distribution of the original XML data source. The authors propose an approach to generating the top-K query candidates.

Findings – Experiments with real datasets verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the authors' approach.

Originality/value – The authors proposed a SS approach based on the XSketch summary.