Title
Answering Regular Path Queries through Exemplars
Abstract
Regular simple path query (RPQ) is one of the fundamental operators in graph analytics. In an RPQ, the input is a graph, a source node and a regular expression. The goal is to identify all nodes that are connected to the source through a simple path whose label sequence satisfies the given regular expression. The regular expression acts as a formal specification of the search space that is of interest to the user. Although regular expressions have high expressive power, they act as barrier to non-technical users. Furthermore, to fully realize the power of regular expressions, the user must be familiar with the domain of the graph dataset. In this study, we address this bottleneck by bridging RPQs with the query-by-example paradigm. More specifically, we ask the user for an exemplar pair that characterizes the paths of interest, and the regular expression is automatically inferred from this exemplar. This novel problem introduces several new challenges. How do we infer the regex? Given that answering RPQs is NP-hard, how do we scale to large graphs? We address these challenges through a unique combination of Biermann and Feldman's algorithm with NFA-guided random walks with restarts. Extensive experiments on multiple real, million-scale datasets establish that RQuBE is at least 3 orders of magnitude faster than baseline strategies with an average accuracy in excess of 90%.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.14778/3489496.3489510
PROCEEDINGS OF THE VLDB ENDOWMENT
DocType
Volume
Issue
Journal
15
2
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
2150-8097
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Komal Chauhan100.34
Kartik Jain200.34
Sayan Ranu300.34
Srikanta Bedathur400.34
Amitabha Bagchi522030.76