Correlation-based query relaxation for example-based dialog modeling

Query relaxation refers to the process of reducing the number of constraints on a query if it returns no result when searching a database. This is an important process to enable extraction of an appropriate number of query results because queries that are too strictly constrained may return no result, whereas queries that are too loosely constrained may return too many results. This paper proposes an automated method of correlation-based query relaxation (CBQR) to select an appropriate constraint subset. The example-based dialog modeling framework was used to validate our algorithm. Preliminary results show that the proposed method facilitates the automation of query relaxation. We believe that the CBQR algorithm effectively relaxes constraints on failed queries to return more dialog examples.