Output-Sensitive Evaluation of Acyclic Conjunctive Regular Path Queries

Conjunctive Regular Path Queries, or CRPQs for short, are an essential construct in graph query languages. In this paper, we propose the first output-sensitive algorithm for evaluating acyclic CRPQs. It is output-sensitive in the sense that its complexity is a function of the sizes of the input graph and of the query output. In particular, it does not depend on the output sizes of the regular expressions that appear in the query, as these sizes can be much larger than the query output size. Our algorithm proceeds in two stages. In the first stage, it contracts the given query into a free-connex acyclic one such that the output of the original query can be obtained from the output of the contracted one. This contraction removes bound variables by composing regular expressions or by promoting bound variables to free ones. The minimum necessary number of promoted bound variables gives the contraction width, which is a novel parameter specific to CRPQs. In the second stage, our algorithm evaluates the free-connex acyclic CRPQ and projects away the columns of the promoted bound variables. It ensures output-sensitivity by computing the calibrated outputs of the regular expressions appearing in the free-connex acyclic CRPQ in time proportional to their sizes. Our algorithm has lower complexity than the state-of-the-art approaches for problem instances where (i) the query output is asymptotically smaller than the worst-case output size or (ii) the largest output size of any of the regular expression in the query.