Querying for Information Integration: How to go from an Imprecise Intent to a Precise Query?

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Querying for Information Integration How to go
from an Imprecise Intent to a Precise Query?

• Aditya Telang
• Sharma Chakravarthy, Chengkai Li

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Motivation

• Retrieve castles near London that are reachable
  by train in less than 2 hours
• Find 3-bedroom houses in Houston within 2 miles
  of a school and within 5 miles of a highway and
  priced under 250,000
• Retrieve French restaurants within 1 mile of
  IMAX Theater in Dallas, Texas

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Current Scenario

• Retrieve castles near London that are
• reachable by train in less than 2 hours

- Decision Making Process - Manually Combine
Results to arrive at a decision
London Train schedules
Trains from London
Castles Near London
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Ideal Scenario
Intent Retrieve castles near London that are
reachable by train in less than 2 hours
Information Integration System
Actual Results for the intent
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The InfoMosaic Approach
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Query Specification
Query Castle within 2 hours by train from London

• Query Bank within 1 mile of University of
  Texas, Arlington

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How to specify a query?

• Search Method (e.g., Google)
• Just needs to search for the keyword in a set
  of documents
• Get list of documents and post-process (rank,
  cluster, classify, etc.)
• In an Integration scenario, this doesnt work
• bank D1
• University of Texas, Arlington D2
• 1 (out of 1 mile) is ignored
• Intersecting documents returned will not generate
  results desired

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How to specify a query?

• Database Method (e.g., SQL)
• Too rigid
• Need to know database (or source) and its
  corresponding attributes
• SELECT T1.a1, T2.a2 FROM T1, T2 WHERE
• Web is not organized as a database hence exact
  mapping between sources and attributes is not
  feasible and not available

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How to specify a query?

• Natural Language
• Ideal mechanism
• Inherently hard considering ambiguities of
  natural language.
• school institution for education group of fish
• Mechanisms such as Question-Answering frameworks
  focus on sophisticated language models built for
  specific domains independently.
• Incorrect assumption in a integration scenario

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Query Specification

• Query castle near London

SELECT castle.name, FROM castle_DB WHERE Castle.
location London
Relation containing tuples
List of documents retrieved from Web containing
text castle near London
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Query Specification

• Query castle near London

SELECT castle. WHERE castle.place London
No idea about user intent Castle building,
move in chess, ?
Information Integration
No idea about source, schema, attributes, etc. No
idea about how to pose a query
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Proposed Approach

• Approach refine-as-you-input
• Approach verify-after-input

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Approach 1 Refine-as-you-input

• Based on most popular paradigm of querying used
  today keyword search
• Input Set of keywords/concepts (e.g., castle,
  train, )
• Output Set of 1 or more Precise Structured Query
• Challenge
• Keyword Resolution entity, attribute, value?
• Generating Query from minimal information
• Problem
• Could result in too many non-relevant queries
• Positive
• Paradigm accepted by Web, IR and even DB
  community !!!

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Approach 1 Refine-as-you-input
User Interaction
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Approach 1 Verify-after-input

• Based on a rigorous method of formulation queries
  similar to SQL
• Input user filled template based
• Output single precise query
• Problem
• Users dont like filling too many details
• Coming up with a unique template across domains
• Positive
• Less ambiguous
• Reduced number of user interactions

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Approach 1 Verify-after-input
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Evaluation Plan

• Testing the approaches on RDBMS where the schema
  and output is known
• Actual user studies

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Related Work
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Future Work

• Perform extensive experiments to prove the
  validity of the proposed approaches
• Address other issues in information integration
• Current focus Ranking TelangDBRank07

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Thank You !