PODS 2025

Two papers have been awarded the “Distinguished paper award” at the PODS 2025 conference to be held in Berlin (Germany) from June 22 to 27.

The first article, “Minimizing Conjunctive Regular Path Queries” by Diego Figueira, Rémi Morvan and Miguel Romero, looks at how to simplify certain types of queries used to query databases, called CRPQ and UCRPQ, without changing their semantics. The paper shows that it can be decided whether a query can be rewritten in an equivalent but shorter way, which is important because smaller queries are generally faster to execute. Although the problem is complex, they set clear limits on the difficulty of this simplification, and identify special cases where it becomes easier.

The second paper, “Shapley Revisited: Tractable Responsibility Measures for Query Answers”, by Meghyn Bienvenu, Diego Figueira and Pierre Lafourcade, investigates data responsibility measures in database query answering. It proposes a new approach based on weighted sums of minimal supports, which is simpler to calculate than the classical method based on Shapley values, while retaining interesting properties. This new method is effective for many queries, including conjunctive query unions.

 

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