Filtering of Unrelated Answers in a CooperativeQuery Answering System

A database system may not always return answers for a query. Such a query is called a failing query. Under normal circumstances, an empty answer would be returned in response to such queries. Cooperative query answering systems produce generalized and relevant answers when an exact answer does not exist, by enhancing the query scope and including a broader range of information. Such systems may apply various generalization techniques, also referred to as generalization operators, to relax certain conditions and obtain related answers. These answers are not exact but informative answers that potentially contain some of the information that the user needs. Therefore, we propose a method to filter out unrelated answers and return only related answers to the user. We also propose a mechanism to have a restricted and optimized generalized query space by limiting the number of queries produced. We determine the similarity between user query and the answer produced. Unrelated answers are pruned out, and only the related and informative answers are returned to the user.