Adaptation of language model of information retrieval for empty answers problem in databases

Abdelhamid Chellal, Karima Amrouche
2015 2015 12th International Symposium on Programming and Systems (ISPS)  
Information over the web is increasingly retrieved from relational databases in which the query language is based on exact matching, data fulfil completely the query or not. The results returned to the user contain only tuples that satisfy the conditions of the query. Thereby, the user can be confronted to the problem of empty answers in the case of too selective query. To overcome this problem, several approaches have been proposed in the literature in particular those based on query
more » ... relaxation. Others works suggest the use of fuzzy sets theory to introduce flexible queries. Another line of research proposes the adaptation of information retrieval (IR) approaches to get an approximate matching in databases.In this paper, we discuss an adaptation of language model of IR to deal with empty answers. The main idea behind our approach is that instead of returning an empty response to the user, a ranked list of tuples that have the most similar values to those specified in user's query is returned.
doi:10.1109/isps.2015.7244977 fatcat:azt5ldcfhfexnn2cgbi2zz5nf4