A probabilistic optimization framework for the empty-answer problem

Davide Mottin, Alice Marascu, Senjuti Basu Roy, Gautam Das, Themis Palpanas, Yannis Velegrakis

Research output: Contribution to journalConference articlepeer-review

42 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a principled optimization-based interactive query relaxation framework for queries that return no answers. Given an initial query that returns an empty answer set, our framework dynamically computes and suggests alternative queries with less conditions than those the user has initially requested, in order to help the user arrive at a query with a non-empty answer, or at a query for which no matter how many additional conditions are ignored, the answer will still be empty. Our proposed approach for suggesting query relaxations is driven by a novel probabilistic framework based on optimizing a wide variety of application-dependent objective functions. We describe optimal and approximate solutions of different optimization problems using the framework. We analyze these solutions, experimentally verify their efficiency and effectiveness, and illustrate their advantage over the existing approaches.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1762-1773
Number of pages12
JournalProceedings of the VLDB Endowment
Volume6
Issue number14
DOIs
StatePublished - Sep 2013
Externally publishedYes
Event39th International Conference on Very Large Data Bases, VLDB 2012 - Trento, Italy
Duration: Aug 26 2013Aug 30 2013

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Computer Science (miscellaneous)
  • General Computer Science

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