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Beyond search: Retrieving complete tuples from a text-database

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Abstract

A common task of Web users is querying structured information from Web pages. For realizing this interesting scenario we propose a novel query processor for systematically discovering instances of semantic relations in Web search results and joining these relation instances into complex result tuples with conjunctive queries. Our query processor transforms a structured user query into keyword queries that are submitted to a search engine, forwards search results to a relation extractor, and then combines relations into complex result tuples. The processor automatically learns discriminative and effective keywords for different types of semantic relations. Thereby, our query processor leverages the index of a search engine to query potentially billions of pages. Unfortunately, relation extractors may fail to return a relation for a result tuple. Moreover, user defined data sources may not return at least k complete result tuples. Therefore we propose an adaptive routing model based on information theory for retrieving missing attributes of incomplete result tuples. The model determines the most promising next incomplete tuple and attribute type for returning any-k complete result tuples at any point during the query execution process. We report a thorough experimental evaluation over multiple relation extractors. Our query processor returns complete result tuples while processing only very few Web pages.

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Notes

  1. For instance, Yahoo Boss (Clarke et al. 2008) charges currently $0.30 dollar per 1.000 requests for the top-10 search results and OpenCalais (Croft et al. 2009) charges $2000 per 3.000.000 pages that are extracted with their service.

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Acknowledgments

The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement nr. FP7-ICT-2009-5-257859, ‘Risk and Opportunity management of huge-scale BUSiness community cooperation’ (ROBUST). Alexander Löser also received funding from the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology (BMWi) under grant agreement “01MD11014A, ‘MIA-Marktplatz für Informationen und Analysen’ (MIA)”.

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  1. Database Systems and Information Management Group (DIMA), Technische Universität Berlin (TUB), Einsteinufer 17, 10587, Berlin, Germany

    Alexander Löser, Christoph Nagel, Stephan Pieper & Christoph Boden

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  1. Alexander Löser
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  2. Christoph Nagel
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  3. Stephan Pieper
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  4. Christoph Boden
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Correspondence to Alexander Löser.

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Löser, A., Nagel, C., Pieper, S. et al. Beyond search: Retrieving complete tuples from a text-database. Inf Syst Front 15, 311–329 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-012-9403-8

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