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Rewrite rules for search database systems

Published:13 June 2011Publication History

ABSTRACT

The results of a search engine can be improved by consulting auxiliary data. In a search database system, the association between the user query and the auxiliary data is driven by rewrite rules that augment the user query with a set of alternative queries. This paper develops a framework that formalizes the notion of a rewrite program, which is essentially a collection of hedge-rewriting rules. When applied to a search query, the rewrite program produces a set of alternative queries that constitutes a least fixpoint (lfp). The main focus of the paper is on the lfp-convergence of a rewrite program, where a rewrite program is lfp-convergent if the least fixpoint of every search query is finite. Determining whether a given rewrite program is lfp-convergent is undecidable; to accommodate that, the paper proposes a safety condition, and shows that safety guarantees lfp-convergence, and that safety can be decided in polynomial time. The effectiveness of the safety condition in capturing lfp-convergence is illustrated by an application to a rewrite program in an implemented system that is intended for widespread use.

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        • Published in

          cover image ACM Conferences
          PODS '11: Proceedings of the thirtieth ACM SIGMOD-SIGACT-SIGART symposium on Principles of database systems
          June 2011
          332 pages
          ISBN:9781450306607
          DOI:10.1145/1989284

          Copyright © 2011 ACM

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          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          • Published: 13 June 2011

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