There is great interest in supporting imprecise queries over databases today. To support such queries, the system is typically required to disambiguate parts of the user-specified query against the database, using whatever resources are intrinsically available to it (the database schema, value distributions, natural language models etc). Often, systems will also have a user-interaction log available, which can supplement their model based on their own intrinsic resources. This leads to a problem of how best to combine the system's prior ranking with insight derived from the user-interaction log. Statistical inference techniques such as maximum likelihood or Bayesian updates from a subjective prior turn out not to apply in a straightforward way due to possible noise from user search behavior and to encoding biases endemic to the system's models. In this paper, we address such learning problems in interactive data retrieval, with specific focus on type classification for user-specified query terms. We develop a novel Bayesian smoothing algorithm, Bsmooth, which is simple, fast, flexible and accurate. We analytically establish some desirable properties and show, through experiments against an independent benchmark, that the addition of such a learning layer performs much better than standard methods.
Related work reports evaluation based on ad-hoc queries and databases---even arbitrary modification of schema, e.g., changing table and attribute names to match user queries better @cite_21 . We evaluate Bsmooth on IMDb as is' in the benchmark with its own encoding.
@cite_21
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Extending the keyword search paradigm to relational data has been an active area of research within the database and IR community during the past decade. Many approaches have been proposed, but despite numerous publications, there remains a severe lack of standardization for the evaluation of proposed search techniques. Lack of standardization has resulted in contradictory results from different evaluations, and the numerous discrepancies muddle what advantages are proffered by different approaches. In this paper, we present the most extensive empirical performance evaluation of relational keyword search techniques to appear to date in the literature. Our results indicate that many existing search techniques do not provide acceptable performance for realistic retrieval tasks. In particular, memory consumption precludes many search techniques from scaling beyond small data sets with tens of thousands of vertices. We also explore the relationship between execution time and factors varied in previous evaluations; our analysis indicates that most of these factors have relatively little impact on performance. In summary, our work confirms previous claims regarding the unacceptable performance of these search techniques and underscores the need for standardization in evaluations--standardization exemplified by the IR community.