Explore or Exploit? Effective Strategies for Disambiguating Large Databases

Summary: Disambiguation in large databases under limited cleaning budget, with uncertain candidate quality and success. The Explore-Exploit (EE) algorithm learns from ongoing cleaning to allocate budget, beating greedy baselines; robust to unknown cleaning probabilities, validated on real and synthetic data. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 10319
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 5.7514261e-05
Overall Rank: 6,863 | 52.92%
DOI: 10.14778/1920841.1920945

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Reynold Cheng (University of Hong Kong)
2. Eric Lo (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
3. Xuan S. Yang (University of Hong Kong)
4. Ming-Hay Luk (Hong Kong Polytechnic University)
5. Xiang Li (University of Hong Kong)
6. Xike Xie (University of Hong Kong)

BibTeX Citation

@article{cheng_vldb10,
        title = {{Explore or Exploit? Effective Strategies for Disambiguating Large Databases}},
        author = {Cheng, Reynold and Lo, Eric and Yang, Xuan S. and Luk, Ming-Hay and Li, Xiang and Xie, Xike},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '10},
        volume = {3},
        number = {1},
        pages = {815},
        doi = {10.14778/1920841.1920945},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1920841.1920945},
        year = {2010}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
2,711	Progressive Approach to Relational Entity Resolution	2014	VLDB	8.2178865e-05
7,083	Certus: An Effective Entity Resolution Approach with Graph Differential Dependencies (GDDs)	2019	VLDB	5.7075402e-05
9,193	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD	5.3058708e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 9 of 9 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
50	Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00043596705
78	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00036571789
337	Model-Driven Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks	2004	VLDB	0.00020783399
359	Evaluating Probabilistic Queries over Imprecise Data	2003	SIGMOD	0.0002023153
390	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00019382486
722	Adaptive Filters for Continuous Queries over Distributed Data Streams	2003	SIGMOD	0.00014627248
1,097	Probabilistic Skylines on Uncertain Data	2007	VLDB	0.00012181027
3,371	Modeling and Querying Possible Repairs in Duplicate Detection	2009	VLDB	7.4697134e-05
5,318	Cleaning Uncertain Data with Quality Guarantees	2008	VLDB	6.2672687e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,371	Modeling and Querying Possible Repairs in Duplicate Detection	2009	VLDB
2	359	Evaluating Probabilistic Queries over Imprecise Data	2003	SIGMOD
3	4,420	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB
4	4,499	Cleaning Inconsistencies in Information Extraction via Prioritized Repairs	2014	PODS
5	1,605	Efficient Search for the Top-k Probable Nearest Neighbors in Uncertain Databases	2008	VLDB
6	13,029	Incomplete Path Expressions and their Disambiguation	1994	SIGMOD
7	2,570	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD
8	8,038	Counting and Enumerating (Preferred) Database Repairs	2017	PODS
9	9,193	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD
10	5,318	Cleaning Uncertain Data with Quality Guarantees	2008	VLDB