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397
Learning Information Extraction Rules for Semi-structured and Free Text
- Machine Learning
, 1999
"... . A wealth of on-line text information can be made available to automatic processing by information extraction (IE) systems. Each IE application needs a separate set of rules tuned to the domain and writing style. WHISK helps to overcome this knowledge-engineering bottleneck by learning text extract ..."
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Cited by 428 (9 self)
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. A wealth of on-line text information can be made available to automatic processing by information extraction (IE) systems. Each IE application needs a separate set of rules tuned to the domain and writing style. WHISK helps to overcome this knowledge-engineering bottleneck by learning text extraction rules automatically. WHISK is designed to handle text styles ranging from highly structured to free text, including text that is neither rigidly formatted nor composed of grammatical sentences. Such semistructured text has largely been beyond the scope of previous systems. When used in conjunction with a syntactic analyzer and semantic tagging, WHISK can also handle extraction from free text such as news stories. Keywords: natural language processing, information extraction, rule learning 1. Information extraction As more and more text becomes available on-line, there is a growing need for systems that extract information automatically from text data. An information extraction (IE) sys...
Learning to Extract Symbolic Knowledge from the World Wide Web
, 1998
"... The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable world wide knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a ..."
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Cited by 405 (30 self)
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The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable world wide knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a
Unsupervised Named-Entity Extraction from the Web: An Experimental Study
- ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
, 2005
"... The KNOWITALL system aims to automate the tedious process of extracting large collections of facts (e.g., names of scientists or politicians) from the Web in an unsupervised, domain-independent, and scalable manner. The paper presents an overview of KNOW-ITALL’s novel architecture and design princip ..."
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Cited by 364 (39 self)
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The KNOWITALL system aims to automate the tedious process of extracting large collections of facts (e.g., names of scientists or politicians) from the Web in an unsupervised, domain-independent, and scalable manner. The paper presents an overview of KNOW-ITALL’s novel architecture and design principles, emphasizing its distinctive ability to extract information without any hand-labeled training examples. In its first major run, KNOW-ITALL extracted over 50,000 facts, but suggested a challenge: How can we improve KNOW-ITALL’s recall and extraction rate without sacrificing precision? This paper presents three distinct ways to address this challenge and evaluates their performance. Pattern Learning learns domain-specific extraction rules, which enable additional extractions. Subclass Extraction automatically identifies sub-classes in order to boost recall. List Extraction locates lists of class instances, learns a “wrapper ” for each list, and extracts elements of each list. Since each method bootstraps from KNOWITALL’s domainindependent methods, the methods also obviate hand-labeled training examples. The paper reports on experiments, focused on named-entity extraction, that measure the relative efficacy of each method and demonstrate their synergy. In concert, our methods gave KNOW-ITALL a 4-fold to 8-fold increase in recall, while maintaining high precision, and discovered over 10,000 cities missing from the Tipster Gazetteer.
Content-Based Book Recommending Using Learning for Text Categorization
- IN PROCEEDINGS OF THE FIFTH ACM CONFERENCE ON DIGITAL LIBRARIES
, 1999
"... Recommender systems improve access to relevant products and information by making personalized suggestions based on previous examples of a user's likes and dislikes. Most existing recommender systems use collaborative filtering methods that base recommendations on other users' preferences. ..."
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Cited by 317 (6 self)
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Recommender systems improve access to relevant products and information by making personalized suggestions based on previous examples of a user's likes and dislikes. Most existing recommender systems use collaborative filtering methods that base recommendations on other users' preferences. By contrast, content-based methods use information about an item itself to make suggestions. This approach has the advantage of being able to recommend previously unrated items to users with unique interests and to provide explanations for its recommendations. We describe a content-based book recommending system that utilizes information extraction and a machine-learning algorithm for text categorization. Initial experimental results demonstrate that this approach can produce accurate recommendations.
Wrapper Induction: Efficiency and Expressiveness
- Artificial Intelligence
, 2000
"... The Internet presents numerous sources of useful information---telephone directories, product catalogs, stock quotes, event listings, etc. Recently, many systems have been built that automatically gather and manipulate such information on a user's behalf. However, these resources are usually fo ..."
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Cited by 263 (12 self)
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The Internet presents numerous sources of useful information---telephone directories, product catalogs, stock quotes, event listings, etc. Recently, many systems have been built that automatically gather and manipulate such information on a user's behalf. However, these resources are usually formatted for use by people (e.g., the relevant content is embedded in HTML pages), so extracting their content is difficult. Most systems use customized wrapper procedures to perform this extraction task. Unfortunately, writing wrappers is tedious and error-prone. As an alternative, we advocate wrapper induction, a technique for automatically constructing wrappers. In this article, we describe six wrapper classes, and use a combination of empirical and analytical techniques to evaluate the computational tradeoffs among them. We first consider expressiveness: how well the classes can handle actual Internet resources, and the extent to which wrappers in one class can mimic those in another. We then...
Semi-Markov conditional random fields for information extraction
- In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17
, 2004
"... We describe semi-Markov conditional random fields (semi-CRFs), a conditionally trained version of semi-Markov chains. Intuitively, a semi-CRF on an input sequence x outputs a “segmentation ” of x, in which labels are assigned to segments (i.e., subsequences) of x rather than to individual elements x ..."
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Cited by 248 (10 self)
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We describe semi-Markov conditional random fields (semi-CRFs), a conditionally trained version of semi-Markov chains. Intuitively, a semi-CRF on an input sequence x outputs a “segmentation ” of x, in which labels are assigned to segments (i.e., subsequences) of x rather than to individual elements xi of x. Importantly, features for semi-CRFs can measure properties of segments, and transitions within a segment can be non-Markovian. In spite of this additional power, exact learning and inference algorithms for semi-CRFs are polynomial-time—often only a small constant factor slower than conventional CRFs. In experiments on five named entity recognition problems, semi-CRFs generally outperform conventional CRFs. 1
Learning to Construct Knowledge Bases from the World Wide Web
, 2000
"... The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a knowledge base would ena ..."
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Cited by 240 (5 self)
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The World Wide Web is a vast source of information accessible to computers, but understandable only to humans. The goal of the research described here is to automatically create a computer understandable knowledge base whose content mirrors that of the World Wide Web. Such a knowledge base would enable much more effective retrieval of Web information, and promote new uses of the Web to support knowledge-based inference and problem solving. Our approach is to develop a trainable information extraction system that takes two inputs. The first is an ontology that defines the classes (e.g., company, person, employee, product) and relations (e.g., employed_by, produced_by) of interest when creating the knowledge base. The second is a set of training data consisting of labeled regions of hypertext that represent instances of these classes and relations. Given these inputs, the system learns to extract information from other pages and hyperlinks on the Web. This article describes our general a...
A Hierarchical Approach to Wrapper Induction
, 1999
"... With the tremendous amount of information that becomes available on the Web on a daily basis, the ability to quickly develop information agents has become a crucial problem. A vital component of any Web-based information agent is a set of wrappers that can extract the relevant data from semistructur ..."
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Cited by 188 (6 self)
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With the tremendous amount of information that becomes available on the Web on a daily basis, the ability to quickly develop information agents has become a crucial problem. A vital component of any Web-based information agent is a set of wrappers that can extract the relevant data from semistructured information sources. Our novel approach to wrapper induction is based on the idea of hierarchical information extraction, which turns the hard problem of extracting data from an arbitrarily complex document into a series of easier extraction tasks. We introduce an inductive algorithm, stalker, that generates high accuracy extraction rules based on user-labeled training examples. Labeling the training data represents the major bottleneck in using wrapper induction techniques, and our experimental results show that stalker does significantly better then other approaches; on one hand, stalker requires up to two orders of magnitude fewer examples than other algorithms, while on the other hand...
Hierarchical Wrapper Induction for Semistructured Information Sources
- Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems
, 2001
"... With the tremendous amount of information that becomes available on the Web on a daily basis, the ability to quickly develop information agents has become a crucial problem. A vital component of any Webbased information agent is a set of wrappers that can extract the relevant data from semistructur ..."
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Cited by 178 (34 self)
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With the tremendous amount of information that becomes available on the Web on a daily basis, the ability to quickly develop information agents has become a crucial problem. A vital component of any Webbased information agent is a set of wrappers that can extract the relevant data from semistructured information sources. Our novel approach to wrapper induction is based on the idea of hierarchical information extraction, which turns the hard problem of extracting data from an arbitrarily complex document into a series of simpler extraction tasks. We introduce an inductive algorithm, stalker, that generates high accuracy extraction rules based on userlabeled training examples. Labeling the training data represents the major bottleneck in using wrapper induction techniques, and our experimental results show that stalker requires up to two orders of magnitude fewer examples than other algorithms. Furthermore, stalker can wrap information sources that could not be wrapped by existing inductive techniques
Information Extraction from HTML: Application of a General Machine Learning Approach
- In Proceedings of the Fifteenth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence
, 1998
"... Because the World Wide Web consists primarily of text, information extraction is central to any effort that would use the Web as a resource for knowledge discovery. We show how information extraction can be cast as a standard machine learning problem, and argue for the suitability of relational lear ..."
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Cited by 175 (6 self)
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Because the World Wide Web consists primarily of text, information extraction is central to any effort that would use the Web as a resource for knowledge discovery. We show how information extraction can be cast as a standard machine learning problem, and argue for the suitability of relational learning in solving it. The implementation of a general-purpose relational learner for information extraction, SRV, is described. In contrast with earlier learning systems for information extraction, SRV makes no assumptions about document structure and the kinds of information available for use in learning extraction patterns. Instead, structural and other information is supplied as input in the form of an extensible token-oriented feature set. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach by adapting SRV for use in learning extraction rules for a domain consisting of university course and research project pages sampled from the Web. Making SRV Web-ready only involves adding several simple...
