Related papers: When Can We Answer Queries Using Result-Bounded Da…
Conflicts of interest often arise between data sources and their users regarding how the users' information needs should be interpreted by the data source. For example, an online product search might be biased towards presenting certain…
We consider the problem of performing predecessor searches in a bounded universe while achieving query times that depend on the distribution of queries. We obtain several data structures with various properties: in particular, we give data…
While there has been substantial progress in factoid question-answering (QA), answering complex questions remains challenging, typically requiring both a large body of knowledge and inference techniques. Open Information Extraction (Open…
Question answering (QA) is a critical task for speech-based retrieval from knowledge sources, by sifting only the answers without requiring to read supporting documents. Specifically, open-domain QA aims to answer user questions on…
Question answering has emerged as an intuitive way of querying structured data sources, and has attracted significant advancements over the years. In this article, we provide an overview over these recent advancements, focusing on neural…
It is a crucial mechanism of access control to determine that data can only be accessed for allowed purposes. To achieve this mechanism, we propose purpose-based access policies in this paper. Different from provenance-based policies that…
Previous work has demonstrated that categories are useful and expressive models for databases. In the present paper we build on that model, showing that certain queries and constraints correspond to lifting problems, as found in modern…
Structured queries expressed in languages (such as SQL, SPARQL, or XQuery) offer a convenient and explicit way for users to express their information needs for a number of tasks. In this work, we present an approach to answer these directly…
Assessing the validity of user simulators when used for the evaluation of information retrieval systems remains an open question, constraining their effective use and the reliability of simulation-based results. To address this issue, we…
Database theory is exciting because it studies highly general and practically useful abstractions. Conjunctive query (CQ) evaluation is a prime example: it simultaneously generalizes graph pattern matching, constraint satisfaction, and…
This paper resolves two open problems from a recent paper, arXiv:2403.16981, concerning the sample complexity of distributed simple binary hypothesis testing under information constraints. The first open problem asks whether interaction…
An effective paradigm for building Automated Question Answering systems is the re-use of previously answered questions, e.g., for FAQs or forum applications. Given a database (DB) of question/answer (q/a) pairs, it is possible to answer a…
The set of answers to a query may be very large, potentially overwhelming users when presented with the entire set. In such cases, presenting only a small subset of the answers to the user may be preferable. A natural requirement for this…
Consistent query answering is an inconsistency tolerant approach to obtaining semantically correct answers from a database that may be inconsistent with respect to its integrity constraints. In this work we formalize the notion of…
Promptly and accurately answering questions on products is important for e-commerce applications. Manually answering product questions (e.g. on community question answering platforms) results in slow response and does not scale. Recent…
Geometric modeling by constraints, whose applications are of interest to communities from various fields such as mechanical engineering, computer aided design, symbolic computation or molecular chemistry, is now integrated into standard…
The resilience of a Boolean query is the minimum number of tuples that need to be deleted from the input tables in order to make the query false. A solution to this problem immediately translates into a solution for the more widely known…
When you have a question, the most effective way to have the question answered is to directly connect with experts on the topic and have a conversation with them. Prior to the invention of writing, this was the only way. Although effective,…
We study the problem of set discovery where given a few example tuples of a desired set, we want to find the set in a collection of sets. A challenge is that the example tuples may not uniquely identify a set, and a large number of…
Conjunctive queries are basic and heavily studied database queries; in relational algebra, they are the select-project-join queries. In this article, we study the fundamental problem of counting, given a conjunctive query and a relational…