Minimizing explanations of why-not questions

Abstract

The problem of minimizing explanations of why-not questions exists in many scenarios such as query understanding and debugging. Several explaining techniques have been developed to minimize explanations of why-not questions, however, these techniques returned lots of bad explanations, including unreasonable explanations, incorrect explanations. Moreover, some of them returned all the possible explanations which waste time and space. To address this problem better, we propose a novel explaining approach to avoid such unexpected explanations and we guarantee that the generated explanations are correct and minimum. We propose one algorithm to address two situations: one for query statement contains a relation copy, and the other for query statement contains a query cycle. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach can efficiently get minimum explanations of why-not questions. © 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.