Counting Answers to Existential Positive Queries: A Complexity Classification
Summary: Trichotomy for counting answers to bounded-arity existential positive (EP) formulas: every EP query class falls into one of three complexity regimes, subsuming known CQ/UCQ results. Novel equivalence theorem maps each EP class to a CQ class with identical counting complexity. (summarized by gpt-5-mini on Feb 09 2026)
Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time
Authors
- 1. Hubie Chen (Basque Foundation for Science; University of the Basque Country)
- 2. Stefan Mengel (CNRS; CRIL (Centre de Recherche en Informatique de Lens))
BibTeX Citation
@inproceedings{chen_pods16,
address = {New York, NY, USA},
series = {{PODS} '16},
title = {{Counting Answers to Existential Positive Queries: A Complexity Classification}},
url = {https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2902251.2902279},
doi = {10.1145/2902251.2902279},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the {ACM} {SIGMOD} Symposium on {Principles} of {Database} {Systems}},
publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
author = {Chen, Hubie and Mengel, Stefan},
year = {2016}
}
Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 5 of 5 citing papers.
| Rank | Citing Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 9,036 | Approximately Counting Answers to Conjunctive Queries with Disequalities and Negations | 2022 | PODS | 5.3272169e-05 |
| 11,126 | The Weisfeiler-Leman Dimension of Conjunctive Queries | 2024 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,140 | Counting Answers to Unions of Conjunctive Queries: Natural Tractability Criteria and Meta-Complexity | 2024 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,834 | The Selfish Models Property: Bounding the Complexity of Query Containment and Entailment Problems | 2019 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
| 11,838 | Compiling Existential-Positive Queries to Bounded-Variable Fragments | 2019 | PODS | 5.093636e-05 |
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Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)
Showing 2 of 2 cited papers.
Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.
| Rank | Cited Paper | Year | Venue | Pagerank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 414 | On the Complexity of Database Queries (Extended Abstract) | 1997 | PODS | 0.00018893507 |
| 2,448 | Counting Solutions to Conjunctive Queries: Structural and Hybrid Tractability | 2014 | PODS | 8.5693075e-05 |
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