Publications

Most theoretical frameworks that focus on data errors and inconsistencies follow logic-based reasoning. Yet, practical data cleaning tools need to incorporate statistical reasoning to be effective in real-world data cleaning tasks. Motivated by these empirical successes, we propose a formal framework for unclean databases, where two types of statistical knowledge are incorporated: The first represents a belief of how intended (clean) data is generated, and the second represents a belief of how noise is introduced in the actual observed database instance.

To capture this noisy channel model, we introduce the concept of a Probabilistic Unclean Database, a triple that consists of a probabilistic database that we call the intention, a probabilistic data transformator that we call the realization and captures how noise is introduced, and a dirty observed database instance that we call the observation. We define three computational problems in the PUD framework: cleaning (infer the most probable clean instance given a PUD), probabilistic query answering (compute the probability of an answer tuple over the unclean observed instance), and learning (estimate the most likely intention and realization models of a PUD given a collection of training data). We illustrate the PUD framework on concrete representations of the intention and realization, show that they generalize traditional concepts of repairs such as cardinality and value repairs, draw connection to consistent query answering, and prove tractability results. We further show that parameters can be learned in practical instantiations, and in fact, prove that under certain conditions we can learn a PUD directly from a single dirty database instance without any need for clean examples.

Tree decompositions facilitate computations on complex graphs by grouping vertices into bags interconnected in an acyclic structure; hence their importance in a plethora of problems such as query evaluation over databases and inference over probabilistic graphical models. Different applications take varying benefits from different tree decompositions, and hence, measure them by diverse (sometime complex) cost functions. For generic cost functions (such as width or fill-in), an optimal tree decomposition can be computed in some cases, notably when the number of minimal separators is bounded by a polynomial (due to Bouchitte and Todinca); we refer to this assumption as “poly-MS.” Yet, in general, finding an optimal tree decomposition is computationally intractable even for these cost functions, and approximations or heuristics are commonly used. Furthermore, the generic cost functions hardly cover the benefit measures needed in practice. Therefore, it has recently been proposed to devise algorithms for enumerating many decomposition candidates for applications to select from using specialized, or even machine-learned, cost functions. We present the first algorithm for enumerating the minimal triangulations of a graph by increasing cost, for a wide class of cost functions. Consequently, we get ranked enumeration of the (non-redundant) tree decompositions of a graph, for a class of cost functions that substantially generalizes the above generic ones. On the theoretical side, we establish the guarantee of polynomial delay if poly-MS is assumed, or if we are interested only in decompositions of a width bounded by a constant. Lastly, we describe an experimental evaluation on graphs of various domains (join queries, Bayesian networks and random graphs), and explore both the applicability of the poly-MS assumption and the performance of our algorithm relative to the state of the art.

A document spanner models a program for Information Extraction (IE) as a function that takes as input a text document (string over a finite alphabet) and produces a relation of spans (intervals in the document) over a predefined schema. A well-studied language for expressing spanners is that of the regular spanners: relational algebra over regex formulas, which are regular expressions with capture variables. Equivalently, the regular spanners are the ones expressible in non-recursive Datalog over regex formulas (which extract relations that constitute the extensional database). This paper explores the expressive power of recursive Datalog over regex formulas. We show that such programs can express precisely the document spanners computable in polynomial time. We compare this expressiveness to known formalisms such as the closure of regex formulas under the relational algebra and string equality. Finally, we extend our study to a recently proposed framework that generalizes both the relational model and the document spanners.

Models of uncertain preferences, such as Mallows, have been extensively studied due to their plethora of application domains. In a recent work, a conceptual and theoretical framework has been proposed for supporting uncertain preferences as first-class citizens in a relational database. The resulting database is probabilistic, and, consequently, query evaluation entails inference of marginal probabilities of query answers. In this paper, we embark on the challenge of a practical realization of this framework. We first describe an implementation of a query engine that supports querying probabilistic preferences alongside relational data. Our system accommodates preference distributions in the general form of the Repeated Insertion Model (RIM), which generalizes Mallows and other models. We then devise a novel inference algorithm for conjunctive queries over RIM, and show that it significantly outperforms the state of the art in terms of both asymptotic and empirical execution cost. We also develop performance optimizations that are based on sharing computation among different inference tasks in the workload. Finally, we conduct an extensive experimental evaluation and demonstrate that clear performance benefits can be realized by a query engine with built-in probabilistic inference, as compared to a stand-alone implementation with a black-box inference solver.

In the design of analytical procedures and machine-learning solutions, a critical and time-consuming task is that of feature engineering, for which various recipes and tooling approaches have been developed. We embark on the establishment of database foundations for feature engineering. Specifically, we propose a formal framework for classification in the context of a relational database. The goal of this framework is to open the way to research and techniques to assist developers with the task of feature engineering by utilizing the database’s modeling and understanding of data and queries, and by deploying the well studied principles of database management. We demonstrate the usefulness of the framework by formally defining key algorithmic challenges and presenting preliminary complexity results.

We develop a novel framework that aims to create bridges between the computational social choice and the database management communities. This framework enriches the tasks currently supported in computational social choice with relational database context, thus making it possible to formulate sophisticated queries about voting rules, candidates, voters, issues, and positions. At the conceptual level, we give rigorous semantics to queries in this framework by introducing the notions of necessary answers and possible answers to queries. At the technical level, we embark on an investigation of the computational complexity of the necessary answers. We establish a number of results about the complexity of the necessary answers of conjunctive queries involving positional scoring rules that contrast sharply with earlier results about the complexity of the necessary winners.

We investigate the complexity of computing an optimal repair of an inconsistent database, in the case where integrity constraints are Functional Dependencies (FDs). We focus on two types of repairs: an optimal subset repair (optimal S-repair) that is obtained by a minimum number of tuple deletions, and an optimal update repair (optimal U-repair) that is obtained by a minimum number of value (cell) updates. For computing an optimal S-repair, we present a polynomial-time algorithm that succeeds on certain sets of FDs and fails on others. We prove the following about the algorithm. When it succeeds, it can also incorporate weighted tuples and duplicate tuples. When it fails, the problem is NP-hard, and in fact, APX-complete (hence, cannot be approximated better than some constant). Thus, we establish a dichotomy in the complexity of computing an optimal Srepair. We present general analysis techniques for the complexity of computing an optimal U-repair, some based on the dichotomy for S-repairs. We also draw a connection to a past dichotomy in the complexity of finding a “most probable database” that satisfies a set of FDs with a single attribute on the left hand side; the case of general FDs was left open, and we show how our dichotomy provides the missing generalization and thereby settles the open problem.

To realize the premise of the Semantic Web towards knowledgeable machines, one might often integrate an application with emerging RDF graphs. Nevertheless, capturing the content of a rich and open RDF graph by existing tools requires both time and expertise. We demonstrate eLinda—an explorer for Linked Data. The challenge addressed by eLinda is that of understanding the rich content of a given RDF graph. The core functionality is an exploration path, where each step produces a bar chart (histogram) that visualizes the distribution of classes in a set of nodes (URIs). In turn, each bar represents a set of nodes that can be further expanded through the bar chart in the path. We allow three types of explorations: subclass distribution, property distribution, and object distribution for a property of choice. To efficiently compute the exploration queries, we offer a query engine powered by a worst-case-optimal join algorithm.

We study the complexity of enumerating the answers of Conjunctive Queries (CQs) in the presence of Functional Dependencies (FDs). Our focus is on the ability to list output tuples with a constant delay in between, following a linear-time preprocessing. A known dichotomy classifies the acyclic self-join-free CQs into those that admit such enumeration, and those that do not. However, this classification no longer holds in the common case where the database exhibits dependencies among attributes. That is, some queries that are classified as hard are in fact tractable if dependencies are accounted for. We establish a generalization of the dichotomy to accommodate FDs; hence, our classification determines which combination of a CQ and a set of FDs admits constant-delay enumeration with a linear-time preprocessing. In addition, we generalize a hardness result for cyclic CQs to accommodate a common type of FDs. Further conclusions of our development include a dichotomy for enumeration with linear delay, and a dichotomy for CQs with disequalities. Finally, we show that all our results apply to the known class of “cardinality dependencies” that generalize FDs (e.g., by stating an upper bound on the number of genres per movies, or friends per person).

Regular expressions with capture variables, also known as “regex formulas,” extract relations of spans (interval positions) from text. These relations can be further manipulated via Relational Algebra as studied in the context of document spanners, Fagin et al.’s formal framework for information extraction. We investigate the complexity of querying text by Conjunctive Queries (CQs) and Unions of CQs (UCQs) on top of regex formulas. We show that the lower bounds (NPcompleteness and W[1]-hardness) from the relational world also hold in our setting; in particular, hardness hits already single-character text! Yet, the upper bounds from the relational world do not carry over. Unlike the relational world, acyclic CQs, and even gamma-acyclic CQs, are hard to compute. The source of hardness is that it may be intractable to instantiate the relation defined by a regex formula, simply because it has an exponential number of tuples. Yet, we are able to establish general upper bounds. In particular, UCQs can be evaluated with polynomial delay, provided that every CQ has a bounded number of atoms (while unions and projection can be arbitrary). Furthermore, UCQ evaluation is solvable with FPT (Fixed-Parameter Tractable) delay when the parameter is the size of the UCQ.

Distributions over rankings are used to model user preferences in various settings including political elections and electronic commerce. The Repeated Insertion Model (RIM) gives rise to various known probability distributions over rankings, in particular to the popular Mallows model. However, probabilistic inference on RIM is computationally challenging, and provably intractable in the general case. In this paper we propose an algorithm for computing the marginal probability of an arbitrary partially ordered set over RIM. We analyze the complexity of the algorithm in terms of properties of the model and the partial order, captured by a novel measure termed the “cover width”. We also conduct an experimental study of the algorithm over serial and parallelized implementations. Building upon the relationship between inference with rank distributions and counting linear extensions, we investigate the inference problem when restricted to partial orders that lend themselves to efficient counting of their linear extensions.

The Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) is the most ancient and sacred collection of Jewish texts. Throughout the history, additional religious Jewish texts have been written such as the Mishna, the Babylonian Talmud, and many more. These additional texts are often related to (or inspired by) the Bible. As such, many of them quote verses from the Bible. Depending mostly on their frequency and location within the text, the quotations may indicate a weak or strong semantic relation between a given text and a specific portion of the Bible. Knowing these semantic relations may be beneficial for those interested in studying or investigating the Bible.

We report an ongoing project that aims to establish the machinery for the automatic detection and rigorous representation of quotations of Bible verses within Jewish texts. The project consists of three interleaving components. In the first component, an algorithm for identifying Bible quotations in text is developed. In the second, the results of executing the algorithm on a large and open text corpus are represented as a Linked Data graph (RDF dataset). In the third component, we develop a web frontend for making the dataset accessible to end users.

In the traditional sense, a subset repair of an inconsistent database refers to a consistent subset of facts (tuples) that is maximal under set containment. Preferences between pairs of facts allow to distinguish a set of preferred repairs based on relative reliability (source credibility, extraction quality, recency, etc.) of data items. Previous studies explored the problem of categoricity, where one aims to determine whether preferences suffice to repair the database unambiguously, or in other words, whether there is precisely one preferred repair. In this paper we study the ability to quantify ambiguity, by investigating two classes of problems. The first is that of counting the number of subset repairs, both preferred (under various common semantics) and traditional. We establish dichotomies in data complexity for the entire space of (sets of) functional dependencies. The second class of problems is that of enumerating (i.e., generating) the preferred repairs. We devise enumeration algorithms with efficiency guarantees on the delay between generated repairs, even for constraints represented as general conflict graphs or hypergraphs.

In its traditional definition, a repair of an inconsistent database is a consistent database that differs from the inconsistent one in a “minimal way.” Often, repairs are not equally legitimate, as it is desired to prefer one over another; for example, one fact is regarded more reliable than another, or a more recent fact should be preferred to an earlier one. Motivated by these considerations, researchers have introduced and investigated the framework of preferred repairs, in the context of denial constraints and subset repairs. There, a priority relation between facts is lifted towards a priority relation between consistent databases, and repairs are restricted to the ones that are optimal in the lifted sense. Three notions of lifting (and optimal repairs) have been proposed: Pareto, global, and completion. In this paper we investigate the complexity of deciding whether the priority relation suffices to clean the database unambiguously, or in other words, whether there is exactly one optimal repair. We show that the different lifting semantics entail highly different complexities. Under Pareto optimality, the problem is coNP-complete, in data complexity, for every set of functional dependencies (FDs), except for the tractable case of (equivalence to) one FD per relation. Under global optimality, one FD per relation is still tractable, but we establish Pi-2-p-completeness for a relation with two FDs. In contrast, under completion optimality the problem is solvable in polynomial time for every set of FDs. In fact, we present a polynomial-time algorithm for arbitrary conflict hypergraphs. We further show that under a general assumption of transitivity, this algorithm solves the problem even for global optimality. The algorithm is extremely simple, but its proof of correctness is quite intricate.

We present an algorithm that enumerates all the minimal triangulations of a graph in incremental polynomial time. Consequently, we get an algorithm for enumerating all the proper tree decompositions, in incremental polynomial time, where “proper”means that the tree decomposition cannot be improved by removing or splitting a bag. The algorithm can incorporate any method for (ordinary, single result) triangulation or tree decomposition, and can serve as an anytime algorithm to improve such a method. We describe an extensive experimental study of an implementation on real data from di↵erent fields. Our experiments show that the algorithm improves upon central quality measures over the underlying tree decompositions, and is able to produce a large number of high-quality decompositions.

Traditional algorithms for multiway join computation are based on rewriting the order of joins and combining results of intermediate subqueries. Recently, several approaches have been proposed for algorithms that are “worst-case optimal” wherein all relations are scanned simultaneously. An example is Veldhuizen’s Leapfrog Trie Join (LFTJ). An important advantage of LFTJ is its small memory footprint, due to the fact that intermediate results are full tuples that can be dumped immediately. However, since the algorithm does not store intermediate results, recurring joins must be reconstructed from the source relations, resulting in excessive memory traffic. In this paper, we address this problem by incorporating caches into LFTJ. We do so by adopting recent developments on join optimization, tying variable ordering to tree decomposition. While the traditional usage of tree decomposition computes the result for each bag in advance, our proposed approach incorporates caching directly into LFTJ and can dynamically adjust the size of the cache. Consequently, our solution balances memory usage and repeated computation, as confirmed by our experiments over SNAP datasets.

We propose a novel framework wherein probabilistic preferences can be naturally represented and analyzed in a probabilistic relational database. The framework augments the relational schema with a special type of a relation symbol—a preference symbol. A deterministic instance of this symbol holds a collection of binary relations. Abstractly, the probabilistic variant is a probability space over databases of the augmented form (i.e., probabilistic database). Effectively, each instance of a preference symbol can be represented as a collection of parametric preference distributions such as Mallows. We establish positive and negative complexity results for evaluating Conjunctive Queries (CQs) over databases where preferences are represented in the Repeated Insertion Model (RIM), Mallows being a special case. We show how CQ evaluation reduces to a novel inference problem (of independent interest) over RIM, and devise a solver with polynomial data complexity.

The population of a predefined relational schema from textual content, commonly known as Information Extraction (IE), is a pervasive task in contemporary computational challenges associated with Big Data. Since the textual content varies widely in nature and structure (from machine logs to informal natural language), it is notoriously difficult to write IE programs that unambiguously extract the sought information. For example, during extraction, an IE program could annotate a substring as both an address and a person name. When this happens, the extracted information is said to be inconsistent, and some way of removing inconsistencies is crucial to compute the final output. Industrial-strength IE systems like GATE and IBM SystemT therefore provide a built-in collection of cleaning operations to remove inconsistencies from extracted relations. These operations, however, are collected in an ad hoc fashion through use cases. Ideally, we would like to allow IE developers to declare their own policies. But existing cleaning operations are defined in an algorithmic way, and hence it is not clear how to extend the built-in operations without requiring low-level coding of internal or external functions.

We embark on the establishment of a framework for declarative cleaning of inconsistencies in IE through principles of database theory. Specifically, building upon the formalism of document spanners for IE, we adopt the concept of prioritized repairs, which has been recently proposed as an extension of the traditional database repairs to incorporate priorities among conflicting facts. We show that our framework captures the popular cleaning policies, as well as the POSIX semantics for extraction through regular expressions. We explore the problem of determining whether a cleaning declaration is unambiguous (i.e., always results in a single repair) and whether it increases the expressive power of the extraction language. We give both positive and negative results, some of which are general and some of which apply to policies used in practice.

An intrinsic part of information extraction is the creation and manipulation of relations extracted from text. In this article, we develop a foundational framework where the central construct is what we call a document spanner (or just spanner for short). A spanner maps an input string into a relation over the spans (intervals specified by bounding indices) of the string. The focus of this article is on the representation of spanners. Conceptually, there are two kinds of such representations. Spanners defined in a primitive representation extract relations directly from the input string; those defined in an algebra apply algebraic operations to the primitively represented spanners. This framework is driven by SystemT, an IBM commercial product for text analysis, where the primitive representation is that of regular expressions with capture variables.

We define additional types of primitive spanner representations by means of two kinds of automata that assign spans to variables. We prove that the first kind has the same expressive power as regular expressions with capture variables; the second kind expresses precisely the algebra of the regularspanners—the closure of the first kind under standard relational operators. The core spanners extend the regular ones by string-equality selection (an extension used in SystemT). We give some fundamental results on the expressiveness of regular and core spanners. As an example, we prove that regular spanners are closed under difference (and complement), but core spanners are not. Finally, we establish connections with related notions in the literature.