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A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries

Authors Wim Martens , Matthias Niewerth , Tina Trautner

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Author Details

Wim Martens
  • University of Bayreuth, Germany
Matthias Niewerth
  • University of Bayreuth, Germany
Tina Trautner
  • University of Bayreuth, Germany

Funding

Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant MA 4938/4-1.

Acknowledgements

We thank the participants of Shonan meeting No. 138 (and Hassan Chafi in particular), who provided significant inspiration for the first paragraph in the Introduction, Jean-Éric Pin for pointing us to positive C_ne-varieties of languages, and Jean-Éric Pin and Luc Segoufin for their help with the proof of Proposition 3.13(b). Furthermore, we want to thank the anonymous reviewers of STACS 2020 for useful comments.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Wim Martens, Matthias Niewerth, and Tina Trautner. A Trichotomy for Regular Trail Queries. In 37th International Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science (STACS 2020). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 154, pp. 7:1-7:16, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020)
https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.STACS.2020.7

Abstract

Regular path queries (RPQs) are an essential component of graph query languages. Such queries consider a regular expression r and a directed edge-labeled graph G and search for paths in G for which the sequence of labels is in the language of r. In order to avoid having to consider infinitely many paths, some database engines restrict such paths to be trails, that is, they only consider paths without repeated edges. In this paper we consider the evaluation problem for RPQs under trail semantics, in the case where the expression is fixed. We show that, in this setting, there exists a trichotomy. More precisely, the complexity of RPQ evaluation divides the regular languages into the finite languages, the class T_tract (for which the problem is tractable), and the rest. Interestingly, the tractable class in the trichotomy is larger than for the trichotomy for simple paths, discovered by Bagan et al. [Bagan et al., 2013]. In addition to this trichotomy result, we also study characterizations of the tractable class, its expressivity, the recognition problem, closure properties, and show how the decision problem can be extended to the enumeration problem, which is relevant to practice.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Information systems → Query languages for non-relational engines
  • Information systems → Information retrieval query processing
  • Theory of computation → Problems, reductions and completeness
  • Theory of computation → Regular languages
Keywords
  • Regular languages
  • query languages
  • path queries
  • graph databases
  • databases
  • complexity
  • trails
  • simple paths

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