A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem

Summary: Introduces a probabilistic optimization framework for the empty-answer problem to drive interactive query relaxation. It optimizes objectives to suggest relaxations with fewer predicates, offering optimal and approximate solvers and empirical gains over baselines. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: hde227e655ec25279
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2013
Pagerank: 6.7419575e-05
Overall Rank: 4,184 | 71.96%
DOI: 10.14778/2556549.2556560

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Davide Mottin (University of Trento)
2. Alice Marascu (IBM Research-Ireland)
3. Senjuti Basu Roy (University of Washington Tacoma)
4. Gautam Das (Qatar Computing Research Institute; University of Texas)
5. Themis Palpanas (University of Trento)
6. Yannis Velegrakis (University of Trento)

BibTeX Citation

@article{mottin_vldb13,
        title = {{A Probabilistic Optimization Framework for the Empty-Answer Problem}},
        author = {Mottin, Davide and Marascu, Alice and Roy, Senjuti Basu and Das, Gautam and Palpanas, Themis and Velegrakis, Yannis},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '13},
        volume = {6},
        number = {14},
        pages = {1762--1775},
        doi = {10.14778/2556549.2556560},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2556549.2556560},
        year = {2013}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 10 of 10 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
1,964	Exemplar Queries: Give me an Example of What You Need	2014	VLDB	9.2831855e-05
5,375	Rudolf: Interactive Rule Refinement System for Fraud Detection	2016	VLDB	6.1400457e-05
7,430	EFQ: Why-Not Answer Polynomials in Action	2015	VLDB	5.5139109e-05
8,020	Searching with XQ: the eXemplar Query Search Engine	2014	SIGMOD	5.38983e-05
10,268	Graph Exploration: From Users to Large Graphs	2017	SIGMOD	5.0377816e-05
10,618	Aegis: A Correlation-Based Data Masking Advisor for Data-Sharing Ecosystems	2026	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,140	Recommending Deployment Strategies for Collaborative Tasks	2020	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
12,196	Recommending Deployment Strategies in Crowdsourcing Platforms	2019	SIGMOD	4.9605343e-05
13,955	IQR: An Interactive Query Relaxation System for the Empty-Answer Problem	2014	SIGMOD	-
13,995	The Trento Big Data Platform for Public Administration and Large Companies: Use cases and Opportunities	2013	VLDB	-

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
389	Why Not?	2009	SIGMOD	0.00019254758
478	Automated Ranking of Database Query Results	2003	CIDR	0.00017612826
790	How to ConQueR Why-Not Questions	2010	SIGMOD	0.00013929166
1,649	Relaxing Join and Selection Queries	2006	VLDB	9.9699016e-05
1,897	Probabilistic Ranking of Database Query Results	2004	VLDB	9.3988624e-05

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