arXiv subjects

Fatemeh Nargesian

Publications and source records attributed to Fatemeh Nargesian.

13 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

ListK: Semantic ORDER BY and LIMIT K with Listwise Prompting

Semantic operators abstract large language model (LLM) calls in SQL clauses. It is gaining traction as an easy method to analyze semi-structured, unstructured, and multimodal datasets. While a plethora of recent works optimize various semantic operators, existing methods for semantic ORDER BY (full sort) and LIMIT K (top-K) remain lackluster. Our ListK framework improves the latency of semantic ORDER BY ... LIMIT K at no cost to accuracy. Motivated by the recent advance in fine-tuned listwise rankers, we study several sorting algorithms that best combine partial listwise rankings. These include: 1) deterministic listwise tournament (LTTopK), 2) Las Vegas and embarrassingly parallel listwise multi-pivot quickselect/sort (LMPQSelect, LMPQSort), and 3) a basic Monte Carlo listwise tournament filter (LTFilter). Of these, listwise multi-pivot quickselect/sort are studied here for the first time. The full framework provides a query optimizer for combining the above physical operators based on the target recall to minimize latency. We provide theoretical analysis to easily tune parameters and provide cost estimates for query optimizers. ListK empirically dominates the Pareto frontier, halving latency at virtually no cost to recall and NDCG compared to prior art.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2025

Approximating Opaque Top-k Queries

Combining query answering and data science workloads has become prevalent. An important class of such workloads is top-k queries with a scoring function implemented as an opaque UDF - a black box whose internal structure and scores on the search domain are unavailable. Some typical examples include costly calls to fuzzy classification and regression models. The models may also be changed in an ad-hoc manner. Since the algorithm does not know the scoring function's behavior on the input data, opaque top-k queries become expensive to evaluate exactly or speed up by indexing. Hence, we propose an approximation algorithm for opaque top-k query answering. Our proposed solution is a task-independent hierarchical index and a novel bandit algorithm. The index clusters elements by some cheap vector representation then builds a tree of the clusters. Our bandit is a diminishing returns submodular epsilon-greedy bandit algorithm that maximizes the sum of the solution set's scores. Our bandit models the distribution of scores in each arm using a histogram, then targets arms with fat tails. We prove that our bandit algorithm approaches a constant factor of the optimal algorithm. We evaluate our standalone library on large synthetic, image, and tabular datasets over a variety of scoring functions. Our method accelerates the time required to achieve nearly optimal scores by up to an order of magnitude compared to exhaustive scan while consistently outperforming baseline sampling algorithms.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

OpenForge: Probabilistic Metadata Integration

Modern data stores increasingly rely on metadata for enabling diverse activities such as data cataloging and search. However, metadata curation remains a labor-intensive task, and the broader challenge of metadata maintenance -- ensuring its consistency, usefulness, and freshness -- has been largely overlooked. In this work, we tackle the problem of resolving relationships among metadata concepts from disparate sources. These relationships are critical for creating clean, consistent, and up-to-date metadata repositories, and a central challenge for metadata integration. We propose OpenForge, a two-stage prior-posterior framework for metadata integration. In the first stage, OpenForge exploits multiple methods including fine-tuned large language models to obtain prior beliefs about concept relationships. In the second stage, OpenForge refines these predictions by leveraging Markov Random Field, a probabilistic graphical model. We formalize metadata integration as an optimization problem, where the objective is to identify the relationship assignments that maximize the joint probability of assignments. The MRF formulation allows OpenForge to capture prior beliefs while encoding critical relationship properties, such as transitivity, in probabilistic inference. Experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of OpenForge. On a use case of matching two metadata vocabularies, OpenForge outperforms GPT-4, the second-best method, by 25 F1-score points.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2024

FairEM360: A Suite for Responsible Entity Matching

Entity matching is one the earliest tasks that occur in the big data pipeline and is alarmingly exposed to unintentional biases that affect the quality of data. Identifying and mitigating the biases that exist in the data or are introduced by the matcher at this stage can contribute to promoting fairness in downstream tasks. This demonstration showcases FairEM360, a framework for 1) auditing the output of entity matchers across a wide range of fairness measures and paradigms, 2) providing potential explanations for the underlying reasons for unfairness, and 3) providing resolutions for the unfairness issues through an exploratory process with human-in-the-loop feedback, utilizing an ensemble of matchers. We aspire for FairEM360 to contribute to the prioritization of fairness as a key consideration in the evaluation of EM pipelines.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Through the Fairness Lens: Experimental Analysis and Evaluation of Entity Matching

Entity matching (EM) is a challenging problem studied by different communities for over half a century. Algorithmic fairness has also become a timely topic to address machine bias and its societal impacts. Despite extensive research on these two topics, little attention has been paid to the fairness of entity matching. Towards addressing this gap, we perform an extensive experimental evaluation of a variety of EM techniques in this paper. We generated two social datasets from publicly available datasets for the purpose of auditing EM through the lens of fairness. Our findings underscore potential unfairness under two common conditions in real-world societies: (i) when some demographic groups are overrepresented, and (ii) when names are more similar in some groups compared to others. Among our many findings, it is noteworthy to mention that while various fairness definitions are valuable for different settings, due to EM's class imbalance nature, measures such as positive predictive value parity and true positive rate parity are, in general, more capable of revealing EM unfairness.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

KOIOS: Top-k Semantic Overlap Set Search

We study the top-k set similarity search problem using semantic overlap. While vanilla overlap requires exact matches between set elements, semantic overlap allows elements that are syntactically different but semantically related to increase the overlap. The semantic overlap is the maximum matching score of a bipartite graph, where an edge weight between two set elements is defined by a user-defined similarity function, e.g., cosine similarity between embeddings. Common techniques like token indexes fail for semantic search since similar elements may be unrelated at the character level. Further, verifying candidates is expensive (cubic versus linear for syntactic overlap), calling for highly selective filters. We propose KOIOS, the first exact and efficient algorithm for semantic overlap search. KOIOS leverages sophisticated filters to minimize the number of required graph-matching calculations. Our experiments show that for medium to large sets less than 5% of the candidate sets need verification, and more than half of those sets are further pruned without requiring the expensive graph matching. We show the efficiency of our algorithm on four real datasets and demonstrate the improved result quality of semantic over vanilla set similarity search.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Sampling over Union of Joins

Data scientists often draw on multiple relational data sources for analysis. A standard assumption in learning and approximate query answering is that the data is a uniform and independent sample of the underlying distribution. To avoid the cost of join and union, given a set of joins, we study the problem of obtaining a random sample from the union of joins without performing the full join and union. We present a general framework for random sampling over the set union of chain, acyclic, and cyclic joins, with sample uniformity and independence guarantees. We study the novel problem of the union of joins size evaluation and propose two approximation methods based on histograms of columns and random walks on data. We propose an online union sampling framework that initializes with cheap-to-calculate parameter approximations and refines them on the fly during sampling. We evaluate our framework on workloads from the TPC-H benchmark and explore the trade-off of the accuracy of union approximation and sampling efficiency.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2023

Pylon: Semantic Table Union Search in Data Lakes

The large size and fast growth of data repositories, such as data lakes, has spurred the need for data discovery to help analysts find related data. The problem has become challenging as (i) a user typically does not know what datasets exist in an enormous data repository; and (ii) there is usually a lack of a unified data model to capture the interrelationships between heterogeneous datasets from disparate sources. In this work, we address one important class of discovery needs: finding union-able tables. The task is to find tables in a data lake that can be unioned with a given query table. The challenge is to recognize union-able columns even if they are represented differently. In this paper, we propose a data-driven learning approach: specifically, an unsupervised representation learning and embedding retrieval task. Our key idea is to exploit self-supervised contrastive learning to learn an embedding model that takes into account the indexing/search data structure and produces embeddings close by for columns with semantically similar values while pushing apart columns with semantically dissimilar values. We then find union-able tables based on similarities between their constituent columns in embedding space. On a real-world data lake, we demonstrate that our best-performing model achieves significant improvements in precision ($16\% \uparrow$), recall ($17\% \uparrow $), and query response time (7x faster) compared to the state-of-the-art.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2022

TSUBASA: Climate Network Construction on Historical and Real-Time Data

A climate network represents the global climate system by the interactions of a set of anomaly time-series. Network science has been applied on climate data to study the dynamics of a climate network. The core task and first step to enable interactive network science on climate data is the efficient construction and update of a climate network on user-defined time-windows. We present TSUBASA, an algorithm for the efficient construction of climate networks based on the exact calculation of Pearsons correlation of large time-series. By pre-computing simple and low-overhead statistics, TSUBASA can efficiently compute the exact pairwise correlation of time-series on arbitrary time windows at query time. For real-time data, TSUBASA proposes a fast and incremental way of updating a network at interactive speed. Our experiments show that TSUBASA is faster than approximate solutions at least one order of magnitude for both historical and real-time data and outperforms a baseline for time-series correlation calculation up to two orders of magnitude.

physics.data-an↗

arXiv2020

AWLCO: All-Window Length Co-Occurrence

Analyzing patterns in a sequence of events has applications in text analysis, computer programming, and genomics research. In this paper, we consider the all-window-length analysis model which analyzes a sequence of events with respect to windows of all lengths. We study the exact co-occurrence counting problem for the all-window-length analysis model. Our first algorithm is an offline algorithm that counts all-window-length co-occurrences by performing multiple passes over a sequence and computing single-window-length co-occurrences. This algorithm has the time complexity $O(n)$ for each window length and thus a total complexity of $O(n^2)$ and the space complexity $O(|I|)$ for a sequence of size n and an itemset of size $|I|$. We propose AWLCO, an online algorithm that computes all-window-length co-occurrences in a single pass with the expected time complexity of $O(n)$ and space complexity of $O( \sqrt{ n|I| })$. Following this, we generalize our use case to patterns in which we propose an algorithm that computes all-window-length co-occurrence with expected time complexity $O(n|I|)$ and space complexity $O( \sqrt{n|I|} + e_{max}|I|)$, where $e_{max}$ is the length of the largest pattern.

cs.DS↗

arXiv2020

Knowledge Translation: Extended Technical Report

We introduce Kensho, a tool for generating mapping rules between two Knowledge Bases (KBs). To create the mapping rules, Kensho starts with a set of correspondences and enriches them with additional semantic information automatically identified from the structure and constraints of the KBs. Our approach works in two phases. In the first phase, semantic associations between resources of each KB are captured. In the second phase, mapping rules are generated by interpreting the correspondences in a way that respects the discovered semantic associations among elements of each KB. Kensho's mapping rules are expressed using SPARQL queries and can be used directly to exchange knowledge from source to target. Kensho is able to automatically rank the generated mapping rules using a set of heuristics. We present an experimental evaluation of Kensho and assess our mapping generation and ranking strategies using more than 50 synthesized and real world settings, chosen to showcase some of the most important applications of knowledge translation. In addition, we use three existing benchmarks to demonstrate Kensho's ability to deal with different mapping scenarios.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2020

Data Lake Organization

We consider the problem of creating a navigation structure that allows a user to most effectively navigate a data lake. We define an organization as a graph that contains nodes representing sets of attributes within a data lake and edges indicating subset relationships among nodes. We present a new probabilistic model of how users interact with an organization and define the likelihood of a user finding a table using the organization. We propose the data lake organization problem as the problem of finding an organization that maximizes the expected probability of discovering tables by navigating an organization. We propose an approximate algorithm for the data lake organization problem. We show the effectiveness of the algorithm on both real data lakes containing data from open data portals and on benchmarks that emulate the observed characteristics of real data lakes. Through a formal user study, we show that navigation can help users discover relevant tables that cannot be found by keyword search. In addition, in our study, 42% of users preferred the use of navigation and 58% preferred keyword search, suggesting these are complementary and both useful modalities for data discovery in data lakes. Our experiments show that data lake organizations take into account the data lake distribution and outperform an existing hand-curated taxonomy and a common baseline organization.

cs.DB↗

arXiv2016

LSH Ensemble: Internet-Scale Domain Search

We study the problem of domain search where a domain is a set of distinct values from an unspecified universe. We use Jaccard set containment, defined as $|Q \cap X|/|Q|$, as the relevance measure of a domain $X$ to a query domain $Q$. Our choice of Jaccard set containment over Jaccard similarity makes our work particularly suitable for searching Open Data and data on the web, as Jaccard similarity is known to have poor performance over sets with large differences in their domain sizes. We demonstrate that the domains found in several real-life Open Data and web data repositories show a power-law distribution over their domain sizes. We present a new index structure, Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) Ensemble, that solves the domain search problem using set containment at Internet scale. Our index structure and search algorithm cope with the data volume and skew by means of data sketches (MinHash) and domain partitioning. Our index structure does not assume a prescribed set of values. We construct a cost model that describes the accuracy of LSH Ensemble with any given partitioning. This allows us to formulate the partitioning for LSH Ensemble as an optimization problem. We prove that there exists an optimal partitioning for any distribution. Furthermore, for datasets following a power-law distribution, as observed in Open Data and Web data corpora, we show that the optimal partitioning can be approximated using equi-depth, making it efficient to use in practice. We evaluate our algorithm using real data (Canadian Open Data and WDC Web Tables) containing up over 262 M domains. The experiments demonstrate that our index consistently outperforms other leading alternatives in accuracy and performance. The improvements are most dramatic for data with large skew in the domain sizes. Even at 262 M domains, our index sustains query performance with under 3 seconds response time.

cs.DB↗