REX: Explaining Relationships between Entity Pairs

Summary: REX defines entity relationship explanation by merging knowledge-base graphs with query-log–driven correlations. It efficiently enumerates and ranks explanations via multiple interestingness measures, validated at scale on DBpedia, with a commercial search-engine dataset and user studies. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h161bb11bc8067350
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2012
Pagerank: 6.3841337e-05
Overall Rank: 4,842 | 67.45%
DOI: 10.14778/2074712.2074720

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Lujun Fang (University of Michigan)
2. Anish Das Sarma (Google)
3. Cong Yu (Google)
4. Philip Bohannon (Yahoo)

BibTeX Citation

@article{fang_vldb12,
        title = {{REX: Explaining Relationships between Entity Pairs}},
        author = {Fang, Lujun and Sarma, Anish Das and Yu, Cong and Bohannon, Philip},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '12},
        volume = {5},
        number = {3},
        pages = {241--252},
        doi = {10.14778/2074712.2074720},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2074712.2074720},
        year = {2012}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
5,536	Discovering and Exploring Relations on the Web	2012	VLDB	6.0920872e-05
5,697	Explaining and Querying Knowledge Graphs by Relatedness	2017	VLDB	6.032935e-05
5,924	Summarizing Answer Graphs Induced by Keyword Queries	2013	VLDB	5.9458126e-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
38	DISCOVER: Keyword Search in Relational Databases	2002	VLDB	0.00047394041
217	Efficient IR-Style Keyword Search over Relational Databases	2003	VLDB	0.00024465994
270	BLINKS: Ranked Keyword Searches on Graphs	2007	SIGMOD	0.00022599109
290	ObjectRank: Authority-Based Keyword Search in Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00021955068
293	Bidirectional Expansion For Keyword Search on Graph Databases	2005	VLDB	0.00021943678
332	FG-Index: Towards Verification-Free Query Processing on Graph Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.00020765078
942	SPARK: Top-k Keyword Query in Relational Databases	2007	SIGMOD	0.00012956137
3,088	Learning to Create Data-Integrating Queries	2008	VLDB	7.6596008e-05
3,810	Querying Structured Text in an XML Database	2003	SIGMOD	7.0088933e-05

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