Current Research
I am interested in problems related to structured web search, including web mining, web-scale data management, keyword based retrieval from databases and database ranking.
Structured web search is a new part of traditional web search that is becoming gradually more important as search engines try to answer user queries using structured data instead of just retrieving relevant web pages. More specifically, a big fraction of the query workload of a search engine includes semantically rich queries. For example, {best digital camera around $425} or {50 inch samsung led tv} or {movies near san francisco}. Such queries can be answered better with the usage of structured data sources. For the examples above, a product catalog or a showtime movie listing would produce good answers. In a typical web search engine setting we can find numerous structured data sources, in the format of XML files or data tables, that can be used to satisfy a wide variety of such rich queries.
Providing structured answers to rich queries involves numerous technical challenges that arise from (a) the users are average people, not educated in databases and often oblivious to the presence of structure data, who pose the queries in a free form keyword based string, (b) the system now must understand the query, send it to the approriate database, transform it to a structured query format and retrieve relevant results and (c) there are over one thousand structured data sources to target and the query answer(s) must be produced in milliseconds.
To this end, I am investigating techniques that capture keyword queries as typed by the user, semantically analyze them and then look into methods that exploit such semantics during evaluation / ranking of the queries. The ultimate goal is to satisfy the end user by producing more relevant results and enhance the user experience with information not found on static text centric web pages. This work is part of the Helix project that tries to extend and improve the search experience by combining structured and unstructured information using data management and web mining techniques.
Finally, regardless of the topic, I am naturally attracted to practical problems that are in need of innovative and potentially useful solutions. I have been very fortunate to have part of my research find its way into production as part of Bing and see its effect on user queries. As a result, I am further motivated in focusing my research towards satisfying real user needs.
Short bio
I am a researcher in MSR as a part of the Search Labs team, which I joined in 2006. I got my Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in Databases from the University of Michigan. My PhD advisor was Prof. H.V.Jagadish. My thesis work was on query processing and optimization -- it is included as a key part of the Timber project. I also hold a master’s degree in Computer Science from Northeastern University in Boston and did my undergrad in Computer Science at University of Macedonia in Thessaloniki, Greece. Besides my research work at the university, I did 2 long internships working for 8 months with the Microsoft Research Database Group in 2001 and for 7 months with the IBM Research Advanced Optimizations Group in 2005.
Recent publications are listed below, also found on DBLP. Please email me for electronic copies. Some of my publications are well received, having been cited a total of over 700 times (source g-scholar).
- Sreenivas Gollapudi, Samuel Ieong, Alexandros Ntoulas, and Stelios Paparizos, Efficient Query Rewrite for Structured Web Queries, in ACM Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM), ACM, October 2011
- Jeffrey Pound, Stelios Paparizos, and Panayiotis Tsaparas, Facet Discovery for Structured Web Search: A Query-log Mining Approach, in Proc. SIGMOD Conf., June 2011
- Hoa Nguyen, Ariel Fuxman, Stelios Paparizos, Juliana Freire, and Rakesh Agrawal, Synthesizing Products from Online Catalogs, in PVLDB, vol. 4, no. 7, pp. 409-418, April 2011
- Tao Cheng, Hady Lauw, and Stelios Paparizos, Entity Synonyms for Structured Web Search, in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2011
- tao cheng, hady lauw, and stelios paparizos, Entity Synonyms for Structured Web Search, in IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering (TKDE), 2011
- Nikos Sarkas, Stelios Paparizos, and Panayiotis Tsaparas, Structured Annotations of Web Queries, in Proc. SIGMOD Conf., June 2010
- Tao Cheng, Hady Lauw, and Stelios Paparizos, Fuzzy Matching of Web Queries to Structured Data, in Proc. ICDE Conf, March 2010
- Stelios Paparizos, Alexandros Ntoulas, John Shafer, and Rakesh Agrawal, Answering web queries using structured data sources, in Proc. SIGMOD Conf., June 2009
- Yuqing Wu, Stelios Paparizos, and H. V. Jagadish, Querying XML in TIMBER, in IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 15-24, 2008
- Stelios Paparizos, Jignesh M. Patel, and H. V. Jagadish, SIGOPT: Using Schema to Optimize XML Query Processing, in Proc. ICDE Conf., September 2007
- Stelios Paparizos and H. V. Jagadish, The Importance of Algebra for XML Query Processing, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 4254, pp. 126-135, 2006
- Stelios Paparizos and H. V. Jagadish, Pattern tree algebras: sets or sequences?, in Proc. VLDB Conf., August 2005
- Stelios Paparizos, Yuqing Wu, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, and H. V. Jagadish, Tree Logical Classes for Efficient Evaluation of XQuery, in Proc. SIGMOD Conf., June 2004
- Zhimin Chen, H. V. Jagadish, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, and Stelios Paparizos, From Tree Patterns to Generalized Tree Patterns: On Efficient Evaluation of XQuery, in Proc. VLDB Conf., September 2003
- Roger Barga, David Lomet, Stelios Paparizos, Haifeng Yu, and Sirish Chandrasekaran, Persistent Applications via Automatic Recovery, in IDEAS Conference, IEEE Computer Society, Hong Kong, July 2003
- Stelios Paparizos, Shurug Al-Khalifa, Adriane Chapman, H. V. Jagadish, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Andrew Nierman, Jignesh M. Patel, Divesh Srivastava, Nuwee Wiwatwattana, Yuqing Wu, and Cong Yu, Timber: A native system for quering XML, in Proc. SIGMOD Conf., June 2003
- Stelios Paparizos, Shurug Al-Khalifa, H. V. Jagadish, Andrew Nierman, and Yuqing Wu, A Physical Algebra for XML, 2002
- H. V. Jagadish, Shurug Al-Khalifa, Adriane Chapman, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Andrew Nierman, Stelios Paparizos, Jignesh M. Patel, Divesh Srivastava, Nuwee Wiwatwattana, Yuqing Wu, and Cong Yu, Timber: A Native XML Database, in VLDB Journal, vol. 11, no. 4, 2002
- Stelios Paparizos, Shurug Al-Khalifa, H. V. Jagadish, Laks V. S. Lakshmanan, Andrew Nierman, Divesh Srivastava, and Yuqing Wu, Grouping in XML, in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol. 2490, pp. 128-147, 2002
Contact Information:
Stelios Paparizos
Microsoft Research
1065 La Avenida
Mountain View, CA 94043, USA
+1-650-693-2022
E-Mail:
firstname.lastname@microsoft.com
Personal Website:
