A Trichotomy for Regular Simple Path Queries on Graphs
Summary: Complete classification of regular languages for regular simple path queries: data complexity is exactly AC0, NL-complete, or NP-complete. Identifies a simple regex fragment for tractability; membership testing is NL-complete for DFAs and PSPACE-complete for NFAs/regexes, with results extended to vertex-labeled graphs. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Guillaume Bagan (INRIA)
- 2. Angela Bonifati (INRIA; University of Lille 1)
- 3. Benoit Groz (Tel Aviv University)
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{bagan_pods13,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '13},
title = {{A Trichotomy for Regular Simple Path Queries on Graphs}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2463664.2467795},
doi = {10.1145/2463664.2467795},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Bagan, Guillaume and Bonifati, Angela and Groz, Benoit},
year = {2013}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 8 of 8 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 530 | An Analytical Study of Large SPARQL Query Logs | 2018 | VLDB | 0.0001709169 |
| 2,209 | Regular Path Query Evaluation on Streaming Graphs | 2020 | SIGMOD | 8.9437338e-05 |
| 3,473 | Efficiently Answering Regular Simple Path Queries on Large Labeled Networks | 2019 | SIGMOD | 7.3864987e-05 |
| 5,418 | Representing Paths in Graph Database Pattern Matching | 2023 | VLDB | 6.2255373e-05 |
| 7,658 | The Complexity of Regular Trail and Simple Path Queries on Undirected Graphs | 2022 | PODS | 5.5738039e-05 |
| 9,012 | Towards Theory for Real-World Data | 2022 | PODS | 5.3323444e-05 |
| 11,225 | Efficient Regular Simple Path Queries under Transitive Restricted Expressions | 2024 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,285 | Complex-Path: Effective and Efficient Node Ranking with Paths in Billion-Scale Heterogeneous Graphs | 2024 | VLDB | 5.093636e-05 |
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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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 312 | A Graphical Query Language Supporting Recursion | 1987 | SIGMOD | 0.00021733819 |
| 348 | Regular Path Queries with Constraints | 1997 | PODS | 0.00020518814 |
| 2,490 | Computing Label-Constraint Reachability in Graph Databases | 2010 | SIGMOD | 8.5090456e-05 |
| 3,452 | The Complexity of Evaluating Path Expressions in SPARQL | 2012 | PODS | 7.4007472e-05 |
| 4,986 | Querying Graph Patterns | 2011 | PODS | 6.4120976e-05 |
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