A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem

Summary: Introduces a probabilistic optimization framework for the empty-answer problem to drive interactive query relaxation. It optimizes objectives to suggest relaxations with fewer predicates, offering optimal and approximate solvers and empirical gains over baselines. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 10851
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2013
Pagerank: 6.9221203e-05
Overall Rank: 4,076 | 72.04%
DOI: 10.14778/2556549.2556560

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Davide Mottin (University of Trento)
2. Alice Marascu (IBM Research-Ireland)
3. Senjuti Basu Roy (University of Washington Tacoma)
4. Gautam Das (Qatar Computing Research Institute; University of Texas)
5. Themis Palpanas (University of Trento)
6. Yannis Velegrakis (University of Trento)

BibTeX Citation

@article{mottin_vldb13,
        title = {{A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem}},
        author = {Mottin, Davide and Marascu, Alice and Roy, Senjuti Basu and Das, Gautam and Palpanas, Themis and Velegrakis, Yannis},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '13},
        volume = {6},
        number = {14},
        pages = {1762--1775},
        doi = {10.14778/2556549.2556560},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2556549.2556560},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,897	Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need	2014	VLDB	9.5243334e-05
5,253	Rudolf: Interactive Rule Refinement System for Fraud Detection	2016	VLDB	6.2989009e-05
7,257	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.661841e-05
7,837	Searching with XQ: the eXemplar Query Search Engine	2014	SIGMOD	5.5344136e-05
10,037	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD	5.1729561e-05
10,339	Aegis: A Correlation-Based Data Masking Advisor for Data-Sharing Ecosystems	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,788	Recommending Deployment Strategies for Collaborative Tasks	2020	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,847	Recommending Deployment Strategies in Crowdsourcing Platforms	2019	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
13,597	IQR: An Interactive Query Relaxation System for the Empty-Answer Problem	2014	SIGMOD	-
13,637	The Trento Big Data Platform for Public Administration and Large Companies: Use cases and Opportunities	2013	VLDB	-

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
385	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019455743
466	Automated Ranking of Database Query Results	2003	CIDR	0.00018014467
856	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013573466
1,636	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	0.00010156479
1,844	Probabilistic Ranking of Database Query Results	2004	VLDB	9.6314187e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,818	A Probabilistic Framework for Vague Queries and Imprecise Information in Databases	1990	VLDB
2	8,191	Probabilistic Database Summarization for Interactive Data Exploration	2017	VLDB
3	3,268	Efficient and Provable Multi-Query Optimization	2017	PODS
4	8,743	A Query Engine for Probabilistic Preferences	2018	SIGMOD
5	1,844	Probabilistic Ranking of Database Query Results	2004	VLDB
6	3,698	Optimizing MPF Queries: Decision Support and Probabilistic Inference	2007	SIGMOD
7	1,636	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB
8	2,149	Probabilistic Optimization of Top N Queries	1999	VLDB
9	13,597	IQR: An Interactive Query Relaxation System for the Empty-Answer Problem	2014	SIGMOD
10	50	Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases	2004	VLDB