13,673 research outputs found
Structurally Tractable Uncertain Data
Many data management applications must deal with data which is uncertain,
incomplete, or noisy. However, on existing uncertain data representations, we
cannot tractably perform the important query evaluation tasks of determining
query possibility, certainty, or probability: these problems are hard on
arbitrary uncertain input instances. We thus ask whether we could restrict the
structure of uncertain data so as to guarantee the tractability of exact query
evaluation. We present our tractability results for tree and tree-like
uncertain data, and a vision for probabilistic rule reasoning. We also study
uncertainty about order, proposing a suitable representation, and study
uncertain data conditioned by additional observations.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure, 1 table. To appear in SIGMOD/PODS PhD Symposium
201
Improving package recommendations through query relaxation
Recommendation systems aim to identify items that are likely to be of
interest to users. In many cases, users are interested in package
recommendations as collections of items. For example, a dietitian may wish to
derive a dietary plan as a collection of recipes that is nutritionally
balanced, and a travel agent may want to produce a vacation package as a
coordinated collection of travel and hotel reservations. Recent work has
explored extending recommendation systems to support packages of items. These
systems need to solve complex combinatorial problems, enforcing various
properties and constraints defined on sets of items. Introducing constraints on
packages makes recommendation queries harder to evaluate, but also harder to
express: Queries that are under-specified produce too many answers, whereas
queries that are over-specified frequently miss interesting solutions.
In this paper, we study query relaxation techniques that target package
recommendation systems. Our work offers three key insights: First, even when
the original query result is not empty, relaxing constraints can produce
preferable solutions. Second, a solution due to relaxation can only be
preferred if it improves some property specified by the query. Third,
relaxation should not treat all constraints as equals: some constraints are
more important to the users than others. Our contributions are threefold: (a)
we define the problem of deriving package recommendations through query
relaxation, (b) we design and experimentally evaluate heuristics that relax
query constraints to derive interesting packages, and (c) we present a crowd
study that evaluates the sensitivity of real users to different kinds of
constraints and demonstrates that query relaxation is a powerful tool in
diversifying package recommendations
On the Complexity of Mining Itemsets from the Crowd Using Taxonomies
We study the problem of frequent itemset mining in domains where data is not
recorded in a conventional database but only exists in human knowledge. We
provide examples of such scenarios, and present a crowdsourcing model for them.
The model uses the crowd as an oracle to find out whether an itemset is
frequent or not, and relies on a known taxonomy of the item domain to guide the
search for frequent itemsets. In the spirit of data mining with oracles, we
analyze the complexity of this problem in terms of (i) crowd complexity, that
measures the number of crowd questions required to identify the frequent
itemsets; and (ii) computational complexity, that measures the computational
effort required to choose the questions. We provide lower and upper complexity
bounds in terms of the size and structure of the input taxonomy, as well as the
size of a concise description of the output itemsets. We also provide
constructive algorithms that achieve the upper bounds, and consider more
efficient variants for practical situations.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figures. To be published to ICDT'13. Added missing
acknowledgemen
Improving Entity Retrieval on Structured Data
The increasing amount of data on the Web, in particular of Linked Data, has
led to a diverse landscape of datasets, which make entity retrieval a
challenging task. Explicit cross-dataset links, for instance to indicate
co-references or related entities can significantly improve entity retrieval.
However, only a small fraction of entities are interlinked through explicit
statements. In this paper, we propose a two-fold entity retrieval approach. In
a first, offline preprocessing step, we cluster entities based on the
\emph{x--means} and \emph{spectral} clustering algorithms. In the second step,
we propose an optimized retrieval model which takes advantage of our
precomputed clusters. For a given set of entities retrieved by the BM25F
retrieval approach and a given user query, we further expand the result set
with relevant entities by considering features of the queries, entities and the
precomputed clusters. Finally, we re-rank the expanded result set with respect
to the relevance to the query. We perform a thorough experimental evaluation on
the Billions Triple Challenge (BTC12) dataset. The proposed approach shows
significant improvements compared to the baseline and state of the art
approaches
Extracting Hierarchies of Search Tasks & Subtasks via a Bayesian Nonparametric Approach
A significant amount of search queries originate from some real world
information need or tasks. In order to improve the search experience of the end
users, it is important to have accurate representations of tasks. As a result,
significant amount of research has been devoted to extracting proper
representations of tasks in order to enable search systems to help users
complete their tasks, as well as providing the end user with better query
suggestions, for better recommendations, for satisfaction prediction, and for
improved personalization in terms of tasks. Most existing task extraction
methodologies focus on representing tasks as flat structures. However, tasks
often tend to have multiple subtasks associated with them and a more
naturalistic representation of tasks would be in terms of a hierarchy, where
each task can be composed of multiple (sub)tasks. To this end, we propose an
efficient Bayesian nonparametric model for extracting hierarchies of such tasks
\& subtasks. We evaluate our method based on real world query log data both
through quantitative and crowdsourced experiments and highlight the importance
of considering task/subtask hierarchies.Comment: 10 pages. Accepted at SIGIR 2017 as a full pape
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