Text-to-SQL translates natural language questions into executable SQL queries, enabling intuitive database access for non-experts. While large language models achieve strong performance on Text-to-SQL with prompting, they still struggle with complex queries that involve deeply nested logic or multiple clauses. A widely used approach employs SQL skeletons--intermediate representations of query logic--to streamline generation, but existing methods are limited by their reliance on a single structural hypothesis and lack of progressive reasoning. To overcome these limitations, we propose LEAF-SQL, a novel framework that reframes skeleton prediction as a coarse-to-fine tree search process. LEAF-SQL enables systematic exploration of diverse structural hypotheses with adaptive refinement. Several key techniques are employed in LEAF-SQL: (1) a three-level skeleton hierarchy to guide the search, (2) a Skeleton Formulation Agent to generate diverse candidates, and (3) a Skeleton Evaluation Agent to efficiently prune the search space. This integrated design yields skeleton candidates that are both structurally diverse and granularity-adaptive, providing a stronger foundation for the SQL generation. Extensive experiments show that LEAF-SQL consistently improves the performance of various LLM backbones. On the official hidden test set of the challenging BIRD benchmark, our method achieves 71.6 execution accuracy, which outperforms leading search-based and skeleton-based methods, affirming its effectiveness for complex queries.

Event extraction is a long-standing and challenging task in natural language processing, and existing studies mainly focus on extracting events within sentences. However, a significant problem that has not been carefully investigated is whether an “event topic” can be identified to represent the main aspects of extracted events. This article formulates the “topic event” extraction problem, aiming to identify a representative event from extracted ones. Specifically, after defining the topic event, we develop a multifocal graph-based framework to handle the extraction task. To enrich the associations of events and their tokens, we construct four event graphs, including the event subgraph and three event-associated graphs (i.e., event dependency parsing graph, event organization graph, and event share token graph), that reflect the internal and external structures of events, respectively. Subsequently, we design a multi-attention event-graph neural network to capture these event graph structures and improve event subgraph embedding. Finally, the output embeddings in the last layer of each channel are concatenated and fed into a fully connected network for topic event recognition. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our method, and the results confirm its superiority over state-of-the-art baselines. In-depth analyses explore the essential factors (e.g., graph structures, attentions, feature generation method, etc.) determining the extraction performance.

Document-level event extraction is a long-standing challenging information retrieval problem involving a sequence of sub-tasks: entity extraction, event type judgment, and event type-specific multi-event extraction. However, addressing the problem as multiple learning tasks leads to increased model complexity. Also, existing methods insufficiently utilize the correlation of entities crossing different events, resulting in limited event extraction performance. This article introduces a novel framework for document-level event extraction, incorporating a new data structure called token-event-role and a multi-channel argument role prediction module. The proposed data structure enables our model to uncover the primary role of tokens in multiple events, facilitating a more comprehensive understanding of event relationships. By leveraging the multi-channel prediction module, we transform entity and multi-event extraction into a single task of predicting token–event pairs, thereby reducing the overall parameter size and enhancing model efficiency. The results demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art method by 9.5 percentage points in terms of the F 1 score, highlighting its superior performance in event extraction. Furthermore, an ablation study confirms the significant value of the proposed data structure in improving event extraction tasks, further validating its importance in enhancing the overall performance of the framework.

Learning topic hierarchies from a multi-domain corpus is crucial in topic modeling as it reveals valuable structural information embedded within documents. Despite the extensive literature on hierarchical topic models, effectively discovering inter-topic correlations and differences among subtopics at the same level in the topic hierarchy, obtained from multiple domains, remains an unresolved challenge. This article proposes an enhanced nested Chinese restaurant process (nCRP), nCRP+, by introducing an additional mechanism based on Chinese restaurant franchise (CRF) for aspect-sharing pattern extraction in the original nCRP. Subsequently, by employing the distribution extracted from nCRP+ as the prior distribution for topic hierarchy in the hierarchical Dirichlet processes (HDP), we develop a hierarchical topic model for multi-domain corpus, named rHDP. We describe the model with the analogy of Chinese restaurant franchise based on the central kitchen and propose a hierarchical Gibbs sampling scheme to infer the model. Our method effectively constructs well-established topic hierarchies, accurately reflecting diverse parent-child topic relationships, explicit topic aspect sharing correlations for inter-topics, and differences between these shared topics. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we conduct experiments using a renowned public dataset and an online collection of Chinese financial documents. The experimental results confirm the superiority of our method over the state-of-the-art techniques in identifying multi-domain topic hierarchies, according to multiple evaluation metrics.

Event extraction is an essential task in natural language processing. Although extensively studied, existing work shares issues in three aspects, including (1) the limitations of using original syntactic dependency structure, (2) insufficient consideration of the node level and type information in Graph Attention Network (GAT), and (3) insufficient joint exploitation of the node dependency type and part-of-speech (POS) encoding on the graph structure. To address these issues, we propose a novel framework for open event extraction in documents. Specifically, to obtain an enhanced dependency structure with powerful encoding ability, our model is capable of handling an enriched parallel structure with connected ellipsis nodes. Moreover, through a bidirectional dependency parsing graph, it considers the sequence of order structure and associates the ancestor and descendant nodes. Subsequently, we further exploit node information, such as the node level and type, to strengthen the aggregation of node features in our GAT. Finally, based on the coordination of triple-channel features (i.e., semantic, syntactic dependency and POS), the performance of event extraction is significantly improved. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our method, and the results confirm its superiority over the state-of-the-art baselines. Furthermore, in-depth analyses are provided to explore the essential factors determining the extraction performance.

In event-based social networks (EBSN), group event recommendation has become an important task for groups to quickly find events that they are interested in. Existing methods on group event recommendation either consider just one type of information, explicit or implicit, or separately model the explicit and implicit information. However, these methods often generate a problem of data sparsity or of model vector redundancy. In this paper, we present a Graph Multi-head Attention Network (GMAN) model for group event recommendation that integrates the explicit and implicit information in EBSN. Specifically, we first construct a user-explicit graph based on the user's explicit information, such as gender, age, occupation and the interactions between users and events. Then we build a user-implicit graph based on the user's implicit information, such as friend relationships. The incorporated both explicit and implicit information can effectively describe the user's interests and alleviate the data sparsity problem. Considering that there may be a correlation between the user's explicit and implicit information in EBSN, we take the user's explicit vector representation as the input of the implicit information aggregation when modeling with graph neural networks. This unified user modeling can solve the aforementioned problem of user model vector redundancy and is also suitable for event modeling. Furthermore, we utilize a multi-head attention network to learn richer implicit information vectors of users and events from multiple perspectives. Finally, in order to get a higher level of group vector representation, we use a vanilla attention mechanism to fuse different user vectors in the group. Through experimenting on two real-world Meetup datasets, we demonstrate that GMAN model consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods on group event recommendation.

With the rapid development of wireless communication technologies, location-based social networks (LBSNs) like foursquare and Gowalla have become very popular. Point of interest (POI) recommendation is a kind of important recommendation in LBSNs for enhancing user experiences. Unlike online social networks, LBSNs have a great deal of check-in data and comment information, which can provide valuable information for POI recommendation. In this paper, a novel recommendation strategy using tensor factorization is proposed for improving accurate rate of POI recommendation. Firstly, the latent dirichlet allocation(LDA) topic model is used to extract topic information and generate topic probability distribution of each POI based on comment information from users. Secondly, the check-in data of each user is divided into multiple data slices corresponding to each hour of a day. By connecting with the topic distributions of the visited POIs of each user, a user-topic-time tensor is conducted to present the potential preferences of all users. Finally, a higher order singular value decomposition (HOSVD) algorithm is employed to decompose the third-order tensor, to get dense preference information for POI recommendation. The experiments on a real dataset show that the proposed approach have better performance than the baseline methods.

Nowadays, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology has been widely employed in the fields of object positioning, tracking and monitoring. However, there are a large number of redundant data generated in RFID systems due to duplicate detection and cross detection. Since RFID data is usually streaming, uncertain and mobile data, traditional static data and data stream filtering strategies cannot be applied to filter the RFID data effectively. In the paper, we first present a three-phase filtering framework under a block-based sliding window model. Aiming to filter the temporal redundant events, we propose an approximate Probability Synthesis Bloom Filter (PSBF) and discuss its filter principle, update rules and error rate in details. Comparing with the existing RFID filters, PSBF can not only filter the redundant probabilistic events, but also can calculate object existential probabilities with temporal decaying, and handle with the situations of location movement and staying at the overlapping areas among multiple readers correctly. The experiments on the simulated dataset show that the proposed filter outperforms the state-of-the-art filtering method.

This paper studies the generic location-aware rank query (GLRQ) over a set of location-aware objects. A GLRQ is composed of a spatial location, a set of keywords, a query predicate, and a ranking function formulated on location, text and other attributes. The result consists of k objects satisfying the predicate ranked according to the ranking function. An example is a query searching for the restaurants that 1) are nearby, 2) offer “American” food, and 3) have high ratings (rating > 4.0). Such queries can not be processed efficiently using existing techniques. In this work, we propose a novel framework called LINQ for efficient processing of GLRQs. To handle the predicate and the attribute-based scoring, we devise a new index structure called synopses tree, which contains the synopses of different subsets of the dataset. The synopses tree enables pruning of search space according to the satisfiability of the predicate. To process the query constraints over the location and keywords, the framework integrates the synopses tree with the spatio-textual index such as IR-tree. The framework therefore is capable of processing the GLRQs efficiently and holistically. We conduct extensive experiments to demonstrate that our solution provides excellent query performance.

With the rapid development of Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), sensor and wireless technologies, a large amount of trajectory data of moving objects are emerging, and trajectory data mining has received more and more attentions recently. However, since the data collected by sensors and RFID readers are usually noisy, it is necessary and meaningful to clean up the noise, including missing detection events and cross detection events, so as to provide high quality data for various applications using trajectory data. Cleaning up the trajectory events should take into account of uncertainty of location and unreliability of event detection at the same time. In the paper, we first discuss the rules to distinguish between normal detection events and false detection events in the trajectories, using constraints on continuous motion between adjacent detection regions and direct moving time between neighboring physical regions. Then, as a unified cleaning framework, we establish a probabilistic region connection graph to represent region detection features, region connection relationships, and region transition probabilities of neighboring physical regions. Focusing on interpolating missing events, we suggest two path-based probabilistic interpolating strategies, namely, the Most Likely Path (MLP) strategy and the Highest Weighting Probability Path (HWPP) strategy. Also, we discuss pruning rules of candidate paths for reducing computational cost. Finally, we conduct experiments over simulation data to demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed methods.

Recently, the RFID technology has been widely used in many kinds of applications. However, because of the interference from environmental factors and limitations of the radio frequency technology, the data streams collected by the RFID readers are usually contain a lot of cross-reads. To address this issue, we propose a KerneL dEnsity-bAsed Probability cleaning method (KLEAP) to remove cross-reads within a sliding window. The method estimates the density of each tag using a kernel-based function. The reader corresponding to the micro-cluster with the largest density will be regarded as the position that the tagged object should locate in current window, and the readings derived from other readers will be treated as the cross-reads. Experiments verify the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed method.

Keyword search is an effective paradigm for information discovery and has been introduced recently to query XML documents. In this paper, we address the problem of returning clustered results for keyword search on XML documents. We first propose a novel semantics for answers to an XML keyword query. The core of the semantics is the conceptually related relationship between keyword matches, which is based on the conceptual relationship between nodes in XML trees. Then, we propose a new clustering methodology for XML search results, which clusters results according to the way they match the given query. Two approaches to implement the methodology are discussed. The first approach is a conventional one which does clustering after search results are retrieved; the second one clusters search results actively, which has characteristics of clustering on the fly. The generated clusters are then organized into a cluster hierarchy with different granularities to enable users locate the results of interest easily and precisely. Experimental results demonstrate the meaningfulness of the proposed semantics as well as the efficiency of the proposed methods.

In XML retrieval, nodes with different tags play different roles in XML documents and then tags should be reflected in the relevance ranking. An automatic method is proposed in this paper to infer the weights of tags. We first investigate 15 features about tags, and then select five of them based on the correlations between these features and manual tag weights. Using these features, a tag weight assignment model, ATG, is designed. We evaluate the performance of ATG on two real data sets, IEEECS and Wikipedia from two different perspectives. One is to evaluate the quality of the model by measuring the correlation between weights generated by our model and those given by experts. The other is to test the effectiveness of the model in improving retrieval performance. Experimental results show that the tag weights generated by ATG are highly correlated with the manually assigned weights and the ATG model improves retrieval effectiveness significantly.

XML documents can be retrieved by means of not only content-only (CO) queries, but also content-and-structure (CAS) queries. Though promising better retrieval precision, CAS queries introduce several new challenges. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach for XML CAS retrieval. The distinctive feature of the approach is that it adopts a content-oriented point of view. Specifically, the approach first decomposes a CAS query into several fragments, then retrieves results for each query fragment in a content-centric way, and finally scores each answer node. The approach is adaptive to versatile homogeneous and heterogeneous data environments. To assess the relevance of retrieval results to a query fragment, we present a scoring strategy that measures relevance from both content and structure perspectives. In addition, an effective approach is proposed to infer answer nodes based on the CAS query and document structure. An efficient algorithm is also presented for CAS retrieval. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed methods through comprehensive experimental studies.