SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora

Summary: SEMA-JOIN automates semantic joins beyond equi-joins by mining a big table corpus (>100M tables) to learn row- and column-level correlations. Join discovery is framed as maximizing aggregate correlation with a linear-program relaxation and a 2-approximation, yielding high precision on public and enterprise data. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hbd55a1971e2fb0f5
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 6.7331936e-05
Overall Rank: 4,204 | 71.75%
DOI: 10.14778/2824032.2824036
PDF: Download (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0)

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Yeye He (Microsoft)
2. Kris Ganjam (Microsoft)
3. Xu Chu (University of Waterloo)

BibTeX Citation

@article{he_vldb15,
        title = {{SEMA-JOIN: Joining Semantically-Related Tables Using Big Table Corpora}},
        author = {He, Yeye and Ganjam, Kris and Chu, Xu},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '15},
        volume = {8},
        number = {12},
        pages = {1358--1369},
        doi = {10.14778/2824032.2824036},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2824032.2824036},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 18 of 18 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,095	BlinkFill: Semi-supervised Programming By Example for Syntactic String Transformations	2016	VLDB	0.00012048043
2,378	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB	8.5495442e-05
2,613	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB	8.2229082e-05
2,642	Auto-Suggest: Learning-to-Recommend Data Preparation Steps Using Data Science Notebooks	2020	SIGMOD	8.1751637e-05
2,748	Uni-Detect: A Unified Approach to Automated Error Detection in Tables	2019	SIGMOD	8.0572603e-05
2,962	Auto-Detect: Data-Driven Error Detection in Tables	2018	SIGMOD	7.8038782e-05
4,426	Auto-Transform: Learning-to-Transform by Patterns	2020	VLDB	6.601896e-05
4,972	Auto-FuzzyJoin: Auto-Program Fuzzy Similarity Joins Without Labeled Examples	2021	SIGMOD	6.3300201e-05
5,533	Putting Things into Context: Rich Explanations for Query Answers using Join Graphs	2021	SIGMOD	6.0906707e-05
5,686	DTT: An Example-Driven Tabular Transformer for Joinability by Leveraging Large Language Models	2024	SIGMOD	6.0347166e-05
7,099	Design and Analysis of a Processing-in-DIMM Join Algorithm: A Case Study with UPMEM DIMMs	2023	SIGMOD	5.5991152e-05
7,531	Auto-Prep: Holistic Prediction of Data Preparation Steps for Self-Service Business Intelligence	2025	VLDB	5.4994676e-05
7,933	TabulaX: Leveraging Large Language Models for Multi-Class Table Transformations	2025	VLDB	5.4228804e-05
8,143	Synthesizing Mapping Relationships Using Table Corpus	2017	SIGMOD	5.3898955e-05
8,989	Auto-BI: Automatically Build BI-Models Leveraging Local Join Prediction and Global Schema Graph	2023	VLDB	5.2418732e-05
10,199	Featurized-Decomposition Join: Low-Cost Semantic Joins with Guarantees	2026	VLDB	5.0599411e-05
10,903	MosaicJoin: Compact Semantic Sketches for Value-Level Join Discovery	2026	VLDB	4.9769913e-05
11,621	Dealing with Acronyms, Abbreviations, and Typos in Real-World Entity Matching	2024	VLDB	4.9769913e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 7 of 7 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1	Access Path Selection in a Relational Database Management System	1979	SIGMOD	0.0023943337
7	Implementation Techniques For Main Memory Database Systems	1984	SIGMOD	0.00081971778
65	Freebase: A Collaboratively Created Graph Database For Structuring Human Knowledge	2008	SIGMOD	0.00038204552
367	InfoGather: Entity Augmentation and Attribute Discovery By Holistic Matching with Web Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.00019876273
484	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017541069
3,306	Multi-column Substring Matching for Database Schema Translation	2006	VLDB	7.4392516e-05
3,750	Discovering Linkage Points over Web Data	2013	VLDB	7.0497806e-05

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2	10,867	Sema: A High-performance System for LLM-based Semantic Query Processing	2026	VLDB
3	10,903	MosaicJoin: Compact Semantic Sketches for Value-Level Join Discovery	2026	VLDB
4	3,946	A System for Semantic Query Optimization	1987	SIGMOD
5	2,378	DeepJoin: Joinable Table Discovery with Pre-trained Language Models	2023	VLDB
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8	10,199	Featurized-Decomposition Join: Low-Cost Semantic Joins with Guarantees	2026	VLDB
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10	2,613	Auto-Join: Joining Tables by Leveraging Transformations	2017	VLDB