Responsibility Measures for Conjunctive Queries with Negation

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Bienvenu, Meghyn, Figueira, Diego, Lafourcade, Pierre
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866915894323576832
author Bienvenu, Meghyn
Figueira, Diego
Lafourcade, Pierre
author_facet Bienvenu, Meghyn
Figueira, Diego
Lafourcade, Pierre
contents We contribute to the recent line of work on responsibility measures that quantify the contributions of database facts to obtaining a query result. In contrast to existing work which has almost exclusively focused on monotone queries, here we explore how to define responsibility measures for unions of conjunctive queries with negated atoms (UCQ${}^\lnot$). Starting from the question of what constitutes a reasonable notion of explanation or relevance for queries with negated atoms, we propose two approaches, one assigning scores to (positive) database facts and the other also considering negated facts. Our approaches, which are orthogonal to the previously studied score of Reshef et al., can be used to lift previously studied scores for monotone queries, known as drastic Shapley and weighted sums of minimal supports (WSMS), to UCQ$^\lnot$. We investigate the data and combined complexity of the resulting measures, notably showing that the WSMS measures are tractable in data complexity for all UCQ${}^\lnot$ queries and further establishing tractability in combined complexity for suitable classes of conjunctive queries with negation.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_04868
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Responsibility Measures for Conjunctive Queries with Negation
Bienvenu, Meghyn
Figueira, Diego
Lafourcade, Pierre
Databases
We contribute to the recent line of work on responsibility measures that quantify the contributions of database facts to obtaining a query result. In contrast to existing work which has almost exclusively focused on monotone queries, here we explore how to define responsibility measures for unions of conjunctive queries with negated atoms (UCQ${}^\lnot$). Starting from the question of what constitutes a reasonable notion of explanation or relevance for queries with negated atoms, we propose two approaches, one assigning scores to (positive) database facts and the other also considering negated facts. Our approaches, which are orthogonal to the previously studied score of Reshef et al., can be used to lift previously studied scores for monotone queries, known as drastic Shapley and weighted sums of minimal supports (WSMS), to UCQ$^\lnot$. We investigate the data and combined complexity of the resulting measures, notably showing that the WSMS measures are tractable in data complexity for all UCQ${}^\lnot$ queries and further establishing tractability in combined complexity for suitable classes of conjunctive queries with negation.
title Responsibility Measures for Conjunctive Queries with Negation
topic Databases
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.04868