On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data

Summary: Non-answer provenance for queries over extracted data; explains why a tuple is not in the result. Proposes a mechanism to generate and present non-answer provenance, enabling researchers to assess extraction uncertainty and explain missing results. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: h3c019363003199ae
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2008
Pagerank: 0.00015438077
Overall Rank: 624 | 95.82%
DOI: 10.14778/1453856.1453938

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Jiansheng Huang (University of Wisconsin)
2. Ting Chen (University of Wisconsin)
3. AnHai Doan (University of Wisconsin)
4. Jeffrey F. Naughton (University of Wisconsin)

BibTeX Citation

@article{huang_vldb08,
        title = {{On the Provenance of Non-Answers to Queries over Extracted Data}},
        author = {Huang, Jiansheng and Chen, Ting and Doan, AnHai and Naughton, Jeffrey F.},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '08},
        volume = {1},
        number = {1},
        pages = {736--747},
        doi = {10.14778/1453856.1453938},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1453856.1453938},
        year = {2008}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 31 of 31 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
389	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019254758
581	The Complexity of Causality and Responsibility for Query Answers and non-Answers	2011	VLDB	0.00016042765
790	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013929166
811	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS	0.00013713646
2,053	Messing Up with BART: Error Generation for Evaluating Data-Cleaning Algorithms	2016	VLDB	9.1054597e-05
2,079	Explaining Missing Answers to SPJUA Queries	2010	VLDB	9.0602682e-05
2,371	Artemis: A System for Analyzing Missing Answers	2009	VLDB	8.5457987e-05
2,459	Tracing Data Errors with View-Conditioned Causality	2011	SIGMOD	8.4137923e-05
2,492	Query-Oriented Data Cleaning with Oracles	2015	SIGMOD	8.3722864e-05
2,847	Data Provenance at Internet Scale: Architecture, Experiences, and the Road Ahead	2017	CIDR	7.9235089e-05
2,975	Answering Why-not Questions on Reverse Top-k Queries	2015	VLDB	7.7807277e-05
3,924	Efficiently Incorporating User Feedback into Information Extraction and Integration Programs	2009	SIGMOD	6.9044317e-05
4,085	The Complexity of Resilience and Responsibility for Self-Join-Free Conjunctive Queries	2016	VLDB	6.7989526e-05
4,742	Going Beyond Provenance: Explaining Query Answers with Pattern-based Counterbalances	2019	SIGMOD	6.4285195e-05
4,769	New Results for the Complexity of Resilience for Binary Conjunctive Queries with Self-Joins	2020	PODS	6.4131333e-05
4,847	Automatic Rule Refinement for Information Extraction	2010	VLDB	6.3701399e-05
4,865	High-Level Why-Not Explanations using Ontologies	2015	PODS	6.3619008e-05
4,871	Explaining Wrong Queries Using Small Examples	2019	SIGMOD	6.3583165e-05
5,374	Why Not Yet: Fixing a Top-k Ranking that Is Not Fair to Individuals	2023	VLDB	6.140487e-05
5,660	A Quest for Beauty and Wealth (or, Business Processes for Database Researchers)	2011	PODS	6.0306257e-05
5,662	Lineage-driven Fault Injection	2015	SIGMOD	6.0298936e-05
6,502	Approximate Summaries for Why and Why-not Provenance	2020	VLDB	5.7468661e-05
7,389	I4E: Interactive Investigation of Iterative Information Extraction	2010	SIGMOD	5.5209957e-05
7,430	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.5139109e-05
7,443	A Unified Approach for Resilience and Causal Responsibility with Integer Linear Programming (ILP) and LP Relaxations	2023	SIGMOD	5.5117047e-05
8,564	Why Not Match: On Explanations of Event Pattern Queries	2021	SIGMOD	5.2999122e-05
8,910	DPXPlain: Privately Explaining Aggregate Query Answers	2023	VLDB	5.2369069e-05
9,090	Understanding Queries by Conditional Instances	2022	SIGMOD	5.2092307e-05
10,914	I-Rex: An Interactive Debugger for SQL	2026	VLDB	4.9605343e-05
12,139	SPARQL Rewriting: Towards Desired Results	2020	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,307	Constraint-based Explanation and Repair of Filter-based Transformations	2018	VLDB	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
17	Provenance Semirings	2007	PODS	0.00059660827
85	ULDBs: Databases with Uncertainty and Lineage	2006	VLDB	0.00035848027
127	Trio: A System for Integrated Management of Data, Accuracy, and Lineage	2005	CIDR	0.00030337791
330	Declarative Information Extraction Using Datalog with Embedded Extraction Predicates	2007	VLDB	0.00020870379
519	RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites	2001	VLDB	0.00016911163
529	An Annotation Management System for Relational Databases	2004	VLDB	0.00016834919
592	Lineage Tracing for General Data Warehouse Transformations	2001	VLDB	0.0001583562
699	MYSTIQ: A system for finding more answers by using probabilities	2005	SIGMOD	0.00014645232
998	To Search or to Crawl? Towards a Query Optimizer for Text-Centric Tasks	2006	SIGMOD	0.00012590871
1,593	DBNotes: A Post-It System for Relational Databases based on Provenance	2005	SIGMOD	0.00010105032
1,769	Structured Querying of Web Text: A Technical Challenge	2007	CIDR	9.6796356e-05
1,801	Building Structured Web Community Portals: A Top-Down, Compositional, and Incremental Approach	2007	VLDB	9.5997383e-05
2,479	A Relational Approach to Incrementally Extracting and Querying Structure in Unstructured Data	2007	VLDB	8.3884752e-05
3,285	Toward Best-Effort Information Extraction	2008	SIGMOD	7.4430978e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	7,722	Interactive Query Explanations Using Fine Grained Provenance	2022	SIGMOD
2	811	Provenance for Aggregate Queries	2011	PODS
3	7,339	NLProveNAns: Natural Language Provenance for Non-Answers	2018	VLDB
4	12,025	On Optimizing the Trade-off between Privacy and Utility in Data Provenance	2021	SIGMOD
5	6,472	On Provenance Minimization	2011	PODS
6	5,556	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD
7	790	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD
8	4,697	Provenance for Natural Language Queries	2017	VLDB
9	9,408	Query-Guided Resolution in Uncertain Databases	2023	SIGMOD
10	1,837	Querying Data Provenance	2010	SIGMOD