Snoopy: Effective and Efficient Semantic Join Discovery via Proxy Columns

Semantic join discovery, which aims to find columns in a table repository with high semantic joinabilities to a query column, is crucial for dataset discovery. Existing methods can be divided into two categories: cell-level methods and column-level methods. However, neither of them ensures both effectiveness and efficiency simultaneously. Cell-level methods, which compute the joinability by counting cell matches between columns, enjoy ideal effectiveness but suffer poor efficiency. In contrast, column-level methods, which determine joinability only by computing the similarity of column embeddings, enjoy proper efficiency but suffer poor effectiveness due to the issues occurring in their column embeddings: (i) semantics-joinability-gap, (ii) size limit, and (iii) permutation sensitivity. To address these issues, this paper proposes to compute column embeddings via proxy columns; furthermore, a novel column-level semantic join discovery framework, ${\sf Snoopy}$, is presented, leveraging proxy-column-based embeddings to bridge effectiveness and efficiency. Specifically, the proposed column embeddings are derived from the implicit column-to-proxy-column relationships, which are captured by the lightweight approximate-graph-matching-based column projection. To acquire good proxy columns for guiding the column projection, we introduce a rank-aware contrastive learning paradigm. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate that ${\sf Snoopy}$ outperforms SOTA column-level methods by 16% in Recall@25 and 10% in NDCG@25, and achieves superior efficiency—being at least 5 orders of magnitude faster than cell-level solutions, and 3.5× faster than existing column-level methods.