When users search for information in domains they are not familiar with, they usually struggle to formulate an adequate (textual) query. Often users end up with repeating re-formulations and query refinements without necessarily achieving their actual goals. In this paper we propose a user interface that is capable to offer users flexible and ergonomic interaction elements to formulate even com...

We examine the effects of various query modifications on the problem of answer projection — the task of retrieving documents that support a given answer to a question. We compare different techniques such as phrase searches and term weighting, and show that some models achieve significant improvements over unmodified queries.

We present a new query formulation interface called FFQI (Fast Formulation Query Interface) which is based on a semantic graph model. The query formulator allows the users with limited IT skills to query and explore the data source easily and efficiently. Here the user inputs are formulated based on the graph search algorithm by using the probabilistic popularity measure. The query ambiguity ha...

This paper reports the results of our experiments performed for the Query Term Expansion Subtask, a subtask of the WEB Task, at the Fifth NTCIR Workshop, and the results of our further experiments. In this paper we mainly investigated: (i) the effectiveness of query formulation by composing or decomposing compound words and phrases of the Japanese language, which is based on a theoretical frame...

The process of translating end-users’ information needs into executable and optimised queries over the data is the main problem that end-users face in Big Data scenarios. In this paper we present the recently started EU project Optique, which advocates for a next generation of the well known Ontology-Based Data Access (OBDA) approach to address this problem. We discuss challenges, present ongoi...

The query inference problem in relational databases consists in translating a sentence of a query language into an unambiguous representation of the query. We describe a new approach for solving the query inference problem based on query formulation cost optimization. To this end the logical schema of a database is modelled as a graph, where each node is a relation, and each arc is an inter-rel...

In this paper, we address the problem of query formulation in the context of multi-domain integration of heterogeneous data on the Web. We argue that effectively tackling this problem requires solutions to query specification and refinement, development and organization of domain taxonomies, and designing query templates to incorporate spatial and temporal conditions across multiple domains. We...