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Adaptive query relaxation and top-k result ranking over autonomous web databases

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Abstract

Internet users may suffer the empty or too little answer problem when they post a strict query to the Web database. To address this problem, we develop a general framework to enable automatically query relaxation and top-k result ranking. Our framework consists of two processing steps. The first step is query relaxation. Based on the user original query, we speculate how much the user cares about each specified attribute by measuring its specified value distribution in the database. The rare distribution of the specified value of the attribute indicates the attribute may important for the user. According to the attribute importance, the original query is then rewritten as a relaxed query by expanding each query criterion range. The relaxed degree on each specified attribute is varied with the attribute weight adaptively. The most important attribute is relaxed with the minimum degree so that the answer returned by the relaxed query can be most relevant to the user original intention. The second step is top-k result ranking. In this step, we first generate user contextual preferences from query history and then use them to create a priori orders of tuples during the off-line pre-processing. Only a few representative orders are saved, each corresponding to a set of contexts. Then, these orders and associated contexts are used at querying time to expeditiously provide top-k relevant answers by using the top-k evaluation algorithm. Results of a preliminary user study demonstrate our query relaxation, and top-k result ranking methods can capture the users preferences effectively. The efficiency and effectiveness of our approach is also demonstrated.

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Acknowledgments

This work is supported by the National Science Foundation for Young Scientists of China (No.61003162) and the Young Scholars Growth Plan of Liaoning (No. LJQ2013038).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Liaoning Technical University, Huludao, China

    Xiangfu Meng, Xiaoyan Zhang, Yanhuan Tang & Chongchun Bi

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  1. Xiangfu Meng
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  2. Xiaoyan Zhang
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  3. Yanhuan Tang
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  4. Chongchun Bi
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Correspondence to Xiangfu Meng.

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Meng, X., Zhang, X., Tang, Y. et al. Adaptive query relaxation and top-k result ranking over autonomous web databases. Knowl Inf Syst 51, 395–433 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-016-0982-4

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