Human-Assisted Graph Search: It’s Okay to Ask Questions

Summary: Introduces HumanGS, the first formal optimization framework for locating unknown targets in DAGs via omniscient reachability queries. Develops algorithms and complexity results under question- and uncertainty-minimization objectives, validated on webpage-taxonomy categorization. (summarized by gpt-5.6-luna on Jul 24 2026)

Paper ID: hc0760ee84be265f2
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2011
Pagerank: 0.00013946699
Overall Rank: 788 | 94.72%
DOI: 10.14778/1978335.1978340

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Aditya Parameswaran (Stanford University)
2. Anish Das Sarma (Yahoo)
3. Hector Garcia-Molina (Stanford University)
4. Neoklis Polyzotis (University of California Santa Cruz)
5. Jennifer Widom (Stanford University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{parameswaran_vldb11,
        title = {{Human-Assisted Graph Search: It’s Okay to Ask Questions}},
        author = {Parameswaran, Aditya and Sarma, Anish Das and Garcia-Molina, Hector and Polyzotis, Neoklis and Widom, Jennifer},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '11},
        volume = {4},
        number = {5},
        pages = {267--278},
        doi = {10.14778/1978335.1978340},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/1978335.1978340},
        year = {2011}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 26 of 26 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
92	CrowdDB: Answering Queries with Crowdsourcing	2011	SIGMOD	0.00034613457
260	Answering Queries using Humans, Algorithms and Databases	2011	CIDR	0.00022866018
754	So Who Won? Dynamic Max Discovery with the Crowd	2012	SIGMOD	0.00014226032
873	Leveraging Transitive Relations for Crowdsourced Joins	2013	SIGMOD	0.00013306946
991	CrowdScreen: Algorithms for Filtering Data with Humans	2012	SIGMOD	0.00012632003
1,267	CDAS: A Crowdsourcing Data Analytics System	2012	VLDB	0.00011253716
1,650	Falcon: Scaling Up Hands-Off Crowdsourced Entity Matching to Build Cloud Services	2017	SIGMOD	9.9690948e-05
3,210	iCrowd: An Adaptive Crowdsourcing Framework	2015	SIGMOD	7.5170875e-05
3,368	Finish Them!: Pricing Algorithms for Human Computation	2014	VLDB	7.351092e-05
4,237	Whom to Ask? Jury Selection for Decision Making Tasks on Micro-blog Services	2012	VLDB	6.7026224e-05
4,537	Arnold: Declarative Crowd-Machine Data Integration	2013	CIDR	6.5399966e-05
4,613	Reducing Uncertainty of Schema Matching via Crowdsourcing	2013	VLDB	6.4858366e-05
5,276	An Online Cost Sensitive Decision-Making Method in Crowdsourcing Systems	2013	SIGMOD	6.1866921e-05
5,478	Crowdsourcing Applications and Platforms: A Data Management Perspective	2011	VLDB	6.0999674e-05
5,586	Efficient Algorithms for Crowd-Aided Categorization	2020	VLDB	6.0582193e-05
6,644	Budget Constrained Interactive Search for Multiple Targets	2021	VLDB	5.7057955e-05
6,791	Crowdsourced Data Management: Overview and Challenges	2017	SIGMOD	5.6647309e-05
6,948	Interactive Graph Search	2019	SIGMOD	5.6210529e-05
7,396	Hear the Whole Story: Towards the Diversity of Opinion in Crowdsourcing Markets	2015	VLDB	5.5198102e-05
8,090	Where To: Crowd-Aided Path Selection	2014	VLDB	5.3745898e-05
9,223	Interactive Graph Search for Multiple Targets on DAGs	2025	VLDB	5.1913816e-05
9,569	Interactive Graph Search Made Simple	2025	SIGMOD	5.1441384e-05
10,246	tDP: An Optimal-Latency Budget Allocation Strategy for Crowdsourced MAXIMUM Operations	2015	SIGMOD	5.041459e-05
10,651	LLM-Powered Interactive Graph Search: A Scalable and Practical Approach	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,396	Graph Summarization for Geo-correlated Trends Detection in Social Networks	2016	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,650	Mob Data Sourcing	2012	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 5 of 5 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
260	Answering Queries using Humans, Algorithms and Databases	2011	CIDR	0.00022866018
816	An Interactive Clustering-based Approach to Integrating Source Query Interfaces on the Deep Web	2004	SIGMOD	0.00013671567
890	Pay-as-you-go User Feedback for Dataspace Systems	2008	SIGMOD	0.00013212032
1,923	Efficient Lineage Tracking For Scientific Workflows	2008	SIGMOD	9.3550626e-05
1,927	A Web of Concepts	2009	PODS	9.3492587e-05

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1	12,627	Probabilistic Query Rewriting for Efficient and Effective Keyword Search on Graph Data	2013	VLDB
2	991	CrowdScreen: Algorithms for Filtering Data with Humans	2012	SIGMOD
3	5,586	Efficient Algorithms for Crowd-Aided Categorization	2020	VLDB
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5	10,920	Noisy Interactive Graph Search: An Uncertainty-Based Approach with Online Modeling of Latent Expertise and Difficulty	2026	VLDB
6	10,651	LLM-Powered Interactive Graph Search: A Scalable and Practical Approach	2026	SIGMOD
7	6,644	Budget Constrained Interactive Search for Multiple Targets	2021	VLDB
8	9,569	Interactive Graph Search Made Simple	2025	SIGMOD
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