Hybrid Query and Instance Explanations and Repairs

Prior work on explaining missing (unexpected) query results identifies which parts of the query or data are responsible for the erroneous result or repairs the query or data to fix such errors. The problem of generating repairs is typically expressed as an optimization problem, i.e., a single repair is returned that is optimal wrt. to some criterion such as minimizing the repair's side effects. However, such an optimization objective may not concretely model a user's (often hard to formalize) notion of which repair is "correct". In this paper, we motivate hybrid explanations and repairs, i.e., that fix both the query and the data. Instead of returning one "optimal"repair, we argue for an approach that empowers the user to explore the space of possible repairs effectively. We also present a proof-of-concept implementation and outline open research problems.