CAREER: Towards a Text-Centric Database Management System

New York University, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

The goal of this project is to help users ask complicated questions over unstructured text and get as results a concrete answer and not simply pointers to more data, as is currently the practice with general search engines. The research examines how to execute efficiently complex queries over multiple web sources and how to estimate the quality of the returned results. The research also examines how to execute queries over subjective, sentiment data by examining the economic context in which the stated opinions are evaluated. The experimental research is strongly linked to the educational goals of the project that include, among others, modernization of the undergraduate curriculum on databases to include the latest trends in database and information systems and the introduction of a graduate course on the transformative role of search technologies in business and society. The results of this project will give the power and tools to the users to quickly process the vast amount of available data on the web and get back answers (and not more documents or data to process). The systems built as part of this project, together with the related data sets, will be available on the project website (http://text-centric-db.stern.nyu.edu/), allowing everyone to evaluate complex queries over web data and build novel applications on top of the built infrastructure.