Papers › Quantifying Semantic Query Similarity for Automated Linear SQL Grading: A Graph-based Approach
Quantifying Semantic Query Similarity for Automated Linear SQL Grading: A Graph-based Approach
Leo Köberlein, Dominik Probst, Richard Lenz
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.
Quantifying the semantic similarity between database queries is a critical challenge with broad applications, ranging from query log analysis to automated educational assessment of SQL skills. Traditional methods often rely solely on syntactic comparisons or are limited to checking for semantic equivalence. This paper introduces a novel graph-based approach to measure the semantic dissimilarity between SQL queries. Queries are represented as nodes in an implicit graph, while the transitions between nodes are called edits, which are weighted by semantic dissimilarity. We employ shortest path algorithms to identify the lowest-cost edit sequence between two given queries, thereby defining a quantifiable measure of semantic distance. A prototype implementation of this technique has been evaluated through an empirical study, which strongly suggests that our method provides more accurate and comprehensible grading compared to existing techniques. Moreover, the results indicate that our approach comes close to the quality of manual grading, making it a robust tool for diverse database query comparison tasks.
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