Papers › Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity
Example-Driven Query Intent Discovery: Abductive Reasoning using Semantic Similarity
Anna Fariha, Alexandra Meliou
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Traditional relational data interfaces require precise structured queries over potentially complex schemas. These rigid data retrieval mechanisms pose hurdles for non-expert users, who typically lack language expertise and are unfamiliar with the details of the schema. Query by Example (QBE) methods offer an alternative mechanism: users provide examples of their intended query output and the QBE system needs to infer the intended query. However, these approaches focus on the structural similarity of the examples and ignore the richer context present in the data. As a result, they typically produce queries that are too general, and fail to capture the user's intent effectively. In this paper, we present SQuID, a system that performs semantic similarity-aware query intent discovery. Our work makes the following contributions: (1) We design an end-to-end system that automatically formulates select-project-join queries in an open-world setting, with optional group-by aggregation and intersection operators; a much larger class than prior QBE techniques. (2) We express the problem of query intent discovery using a probabilistic abduction model, that infers a query as the most likely explanation of the provided examples. (3) We introduce the notion of an abduction-ready database, which precomputes semantic properties and related statistics, allowing SQuID to achieve real-time performance. (4) We present an extensive empirical evaluation on three real-world datasets, including user-intent case studies, demonstrating that SQuID is efficient and effective, and outperforms machine learning methods, as well as the state-of-the-art in the related query reverse engineering problem.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections