Skip to main content

Extracting Information from Semistructured Data

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Advances in Web-Age Information Management (WAIM 2002)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 2419))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

This paper describes work towards automatically building on-line structured information resources from information sources that are comprised largely of natural language but with some structuring conventions. Such conversion requires two phases: region identification of the incoming documents, and mapping the information they contain into a more structured form. We describe a system that uses decision-tree-based machine learning techniques to build a classifier that can accurately identify document regions and discuss pattern-discovery methods for extracting information from the identified regions. Experiments demonstrate that this approach works well.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Serge Abiteboul. Querying semi-structured data. In International Conference on Database Technology, Jan 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  2. Brad Adlberg. Nodose-a tool for semi-automatically extracting structured and semistructured data from text documents. In SIGMOD, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  3. Peter Buneman, Susan Davidson, Mary Fernandez, and Dan Suciu. Adding structure to unstructured data. Technical report, University of Pennsylvania, 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Jim Cowie and Wendy Lehnert. Information extraction. Technical report, Communications of the ACM 39, 1, Jan. 1996.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Alin Deutsch, Mary Fernandez, and Dan Suciu. Storing semistructured data with stored. In SIGMOD, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  6. D. W. Embley, D. M. Campbell, Y. S. Jiang, Y.-K. Ng, R. D. Smith, S. W. Liddle, and D. W. Quass. A conceptual-modeling approach to extracting data from the web. In ER’98, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  7. D. W. Embley, Y S. Jiang, and Y.-K. Ng. Record-boundary discovery in web documents. In SIGMOD, 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  8. Mary Fernandez, Daniela Florescu, Jaewoo Kang, Alon Levy, and Dan Suciu. Strudel: A web site management system. In SIGMOD, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  9. C. Knoblock I. Muslea, S. Minton. A hierarchical approach to wrapper induction. In Third International Conference on Autonomous Agents, (Agents’99), 1999.

    Google Scholar 

  10. N. Kushmerick, D. S. Weld, and R. Doorenbos. Wrapper induction for information extraction. In IJCAI’97, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  11. Michael Ley. DBLP Computer Science Bibliography. http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/, 2001.

  12. Chin Yew Lin. Assembly of topic extraction modules in summarist. In AAAI, Spring Symposium on Intelligent Test Summarization, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Ling Liu, Calton Pu, and Wei Han. Xwrap: An xml-enabled wrapper construction system for web information sources. In ICDE2000, 2000.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Liping Ma, John Shepherd, and Yanchun Zhang. Using machine learning to extract information from semistructured data. Technical report, School of Computer Science and Engineering, UNSW, 2002.

    Google Scholar 

  15. G. Mecca, A. Masci P. Atzeni, P. Merialdo, and G. Sindoni. The araneus web-base management system. Technical report, Exhibits Program of SIGMOD, 1998.

    Google Scholar 

  16. Research Institute NEC. ResearchIndex: The NECI Scientific Literature Digital Library. http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cs, 2001.

  17. Svetlozar Nestorov, Serge Abiteboul, and Rajeev Motwani. Extracting schema from semistructured data. In International workshop on management of semistructured data, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Svetlozar Nestorov, Serge Abiteboul, and Rajeev Motwani. Infer structure in semistruc-tured data. In International workshop on management of semistructured data, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

  19. J. R. Quinlan. C4.5: Programs for machine learning, 1993.

    Google Scholar 

  20. Stephen Soderland, David Fisher, Jonathan Aseltine, and Wendy Lehnert. Crystal: Inducing a conceptual dictionary. In IJCAI’95, 1995.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Ke Wang and Huiqing Liu. Schema discovery for semistructured data. In KDD, 1997.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2002 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Ma, L., Shepherd, J., Zhang, Y. (2002). Extracting Information from Semistructured Data. In: Meng, X., Su, J., Wang, Y. (eds) Advances in Web-Age Information Management. WAIM 2002. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2419. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45703-8_13

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/3-540-45703-8_13

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-44045-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-45703-9

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

Publish with us

Policies and ethics