Query Relaxation for Entity-Relationship Search

Entity-relationship-structured data is becoming more important on the Web. For example, large knowledge bases have been automatically constructed by information extraction from Wikipedia and other Web sources. Entities and relationships can be represented by subject-property-object triples in the RDF model, and can then be precisely searched by structured query languages like SPARQL. Because of their Boolean-match semantics, such queries often return too few or even no results. To improve recall, it is thus desirable to support users by automatically relaxing or reformulating queries in such a way that the intention of the original user query is preserved while returning a sufficient number of ranked results. In this paper we describe comprehensive methods to relax SPARQL-like triple-pattern queries in a fully automated manner. Our framework produces a set of relaxations by means of statistical language models for structured RDF data and queries. The query processing algorithms merge the results of different relaxations into a unified result list, with ranking based on any ranking function for structured queries over RDF-data. Our experimental evaluation, with two different datasets about movies and books, shows the effectiveness of the automatically generated relaxations and the improved quality of query results based on assessments collected on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform.