Selectively estimation for Boolean queries

In a variety of applications ranging from optimizing queries on alphanumeric attributes to providing approximate counts of documents containing several query terms, there is an increasing need to quickly and reliably estimate the number of strings (tuples, documents, etc.) matching a Boolean query. Boolean queries in this context consist of substring predicates composed using Boolean operators. While there has been some work in estimating the selectivity of substring queries, the more general problem of estimating the selectivity of Boolean queries over substring predicates has not been studied.