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: h2a9aa8e41f789a0c
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2010
Pagerank: 5.630394e-05
Overall Rank: 6,974 | 53.12%
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
2,645	Progressive Approach to Relational Entity Resolution	2014	VLDB	8.177221e-05
7,226	Certus: An Effective Entity Resolution Approach with Graph Differential Dependencies (GDDs)	2019	VLDB	5.5810344e-05
9,373	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD	5.1868213e-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
51	Efficient Query Evaluation on Probabilistic Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00042936299
84	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00035963861
343	Model-Driven Data Acquisition in Sensor Networks	2004	VLDB	0.00020519525
370	Evaluating Probabilistic Queries over Imprecise Data	2003	SIGMOD	0.00019846702
407	COMA - A system for flexible combination of schema matching approaches	2002	VLDB	0.00019026291
734	Adaptive Filters for Continuous Queries over Distributed Data Streams	2003	SIGMOD	0.00014374443
1,124	Probabilistic Skylines on Uncertain Data	2007	VLDB	0.00011927351
3,426	Modeling and Querying Possible Repairs in Duplicate Detection	2009	VLDB	7.3087723e-05
5,175	Cleaning Uncertain Data with Quality Guarantees	2008	VLDB	6.2429707e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	3,426	Modeling and Querying Possible Repairs in Duplicate Detection	2009	VLDB
2	4,507	Optimization for Active Learning-based Interactive Database Exploration	2019	VLDB
3	370	Evaluating Probabilistic Queries over Imprecise Data	2003	SIGMOD
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5	1,635	Efficient Search for the Top-k Probable Nearest Neighbors in Uncertain Databases	2008	VLDB
6	13,319	Incomplete Path Expressions and their Disambiguation	1994	SIGMOD
7	2,504	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD
8	8,194	Counting and Enumerating (Preferred) Database Repairs	2017	PODS
9	9,373	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD
10	5,175	Cleaning Uncertain Data with Quality Guarantees	2008	VLDB