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University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Integrating Similarity Based Retrieval and Query Refinement in Databases

Abstract

dc:description

"With the emergence of many application domains that require imprecise similarity-based access to information, techniques to support such a retrieval paradigm over database systems have emerged as a critical area of research. There are two major areas to this search paradigm. The first one is how to interpret similarity search queries in a relational database context. We address this problem by extending relational operators to natively understand similarity-based retrieval and provide similarity operators that act on user-defined data-types. The second major research area is how to interactively improve the query through user interaction (query refinement). We address this problem by extending some information retrieval and machine learning techniques to affect the interpretation of similarity predicates and the query search condition itself. The result is a new query that better satisfies the users information need. The semantics of this domain favor a ""top-k"" retrieval approach where we only seek the best matching results for a query. We therefore developed for each of the two areas (similarity search and query refinement) several techniques to efficiently process queries. For similarity queries our query processing algorithms naturally support the top-k retrieval paradigm by returning the answers in order of their similarity to the query. For query refinement, our query processing algorithms reuse the results from previous queries to quickly answer the new refined queries. The algorithms avoid duplicating work done before and perform only the minimum work needed to return the next answer, thus resulting in up to an order of magnitude performance improvement over a naive re-execution of a refined query."

Degree

thesis:*
Name thesis:degree_name
Ph.D.
Level thesis:degree_level
Dissertation
Discipline thesis:degree_discipline
Computer Science
Grantor
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Year dc:date
2015

Author and committee

dc:creator, dc:contributor.*
Author dc:creator
  • Ortega-Binderberger, Michael
Contributors dc:contributor
  • Sharad Mehrotra

Subjects

dc:subject × 1

Rights

Language dc:language
eng

Identifiers

dc:identifier.*
Identifier
(MiAaPQ)AAI3070037
OAI identifier oai:identifier
oai:www.ideals.illinois.edu:2142/81604

Chain of custody

source
Harvested from
University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
Base URL
www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh
Last updated
2026-07-22
Source record
OAI-PMH GetRecord
citation

Ortega-Binderberger, Michael. Integrating Similarity Based Retrieval and Query Refinement in Databases. Dissertation thesis, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/2142/81604