A distributional–relational database, or word-vector database, is a

database management system In computing, a database is an organized collection of data or a type of data store based on the use of a database management system (DBMS), the software that interacts with end users, applications, and the database itself to capture and an ...

(DBMS) that uses distributional word-vector representations to enrich the semantics of

structured data A data model is an abstract model that organizes elements of data and standardizes how they relate to one another and to the properties of real-world entities. For instance, a data model may specify that the data element representing a car be ...

. As distributional word-vectors can be built automatically from large-scale corpora, this enrichment supports the construction of databases which can embed large-scale commonsense background knowledge into their operations. Distributional-Relational models can be applied to the construction of

schema-agnostic databases Schema-agnostic databases or vocabulary-independent databases aim at supporting users to be abstracted from the representation of the data, supporting the automatic semantic matching between queries and databases. Schema-agnosticism is the property ...

(databases in which users can query the data without being aware of its

schema Schema may refer to: Science and technology * SCHEMA (bioinformatics), an algorithm used in protein engineering * Schema (genetic algorithms), a set of programs or bit strings that have some genotypic similarity * Schema.org, a web markup vocab ...

), semantic search, schema-integration and inductive and

abductive reasoning Abductive reasoning (also called abduction,For example: abductive inference, or retroduction) is a form of logical inference that seeks the simplest and most likely conclusion from a set of observations. It was formulated and advanced by Ameri ...

as well as different applications in which a semantically flexible knowledge representation model is needed. The main advantage of distributional–relational models over purely logical /

semantic web The Semantic Web, sometimes known as Web 3.0, is an extension of the World Wide Web through standards set by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The goal of the Semantic Web is to make Internet data machine-readable. To enable the encoding o ...

models is the fact that the core semantic associations can be automatically captured from corpora, in contrast to the definition of manually curated

ontologies In information science, an ontology encompasses a representation, formal naming, and definitions of the categories, properties, and relations between the concepts, data, or entities that pertain to one, many, or all domains of discourse. More ...

and rule knowledge bases.

Distributional–relational models

Distributional–relational models were first formalized,Freitas, A., Handschuh, S., Curry, E., Distributional-Relational Models: Scalable Semantics for Databases, AAAI Spring Symposium, Knowledge Representation & Reasoning Track, Stanford, 2014 as a mechanism to cope with the vocabulary/semantic gap between users and the schema behind the data. In this scenario, distributional semantic relatedness measures, combined with semantic pivoting

heuristics A heuristic or heuristic technique (''problem solving'', '' mental shortcut'', ''rule of thumb'') is any approach to problem solving that employs a pragmatic method that is not fully optimized, perfected, or rationalized, but is nevertheless ...

can support the approximation between user queries (expressed in their own vocabulary), and

data Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted for ...

(expressed in the vocabulary of the designer). In this model, the database symbols (entities and relations) are embedded into a distributional semantic space and have a

geometric Geometry (; ) is a branch of mathematics concerned with properties of space such as the distance, shape, size, and relative position of figures. Geometry is, along with arithmetic, one of the oldest branches of mathematics. A mathematician w ...

interpretation under a latent or explicit semantic space. The geometric aspect supports the semantic approximation between entities from different databases, or between a query term and a database entity. The distributional relational model then becomes a double layered model where the semantics of the structured data provides the fine-grained semantics intended by the database designer, which is extended by the distributional semantic model which contains the semantic associations expressed at a broader use. These models support the generalization from a closed communication scenario (in which database designers and users live in the same context, e.g. the same organization) to an open communication scenario (e.g. different organizations, the Web), creating an abstraction layer between users and the specific representation of the conceptual model.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Distributional-relational database Computer data Database management systems Natural language processing software Heuristics Language modeling Computational linguistics