Roller: A novel approach to web information extraction

The research regarding web information extraction focuses on learning rules to extract some selected information from web documents. Many proposals are ad-hoc and cannot benefit from the advances in machine learning; furthermore, they are likely to fade away as theWeb evolves and their intrinsic ass...

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Detalhes bibliográficos
Autores: Jiménez Aguirre, Patricia, Corchuelo Gil, Rafael
Formato: artículo
Estado:Versión enviada para evaluación y publicación
Fecha de publicación:2016
País:España
Recursos:Universidad de Sevilla (US)
Repositorio:idUS. Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla
OAI Identifier:oai:idus.us.es:11441/131984
Acesso em linha:https://hdl.handle.net/11441/131984
https://doi.org/10.1007/s10115-016-0921-4
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palavra-chave:Web information extraction
knowledge and data engineering
Software information systems
Propositio-relational learning
Dynamic flattening
Descrição
Resumo:The research regarding web information extraction focuses on learning rules to extract some selected information from web documents. Many proposals are ad-hoc and cannot benefit from the advances in machine learning; furthermore, they are likely to fade away as theWeb evolves and their intrinsic assumptions are not satisfied. Some authors have explored transforming web documents into relational data and then using techniques that got inspiration from inductive logic programming. In theory, such proposals should be easier to adapt as the Web evolves because they build on catalogues of features that can be adapted without changing the proposals themselves. Unfortunately, they are difficult to scale as the number of documents or features increases. In the general field of machine learning, there are propositio-relational proposals that attempt to provide effective and efficient means to learn from relational data using propositional techniques, but they have seldom been explored regarding web information extraction. In this article, we present a new proposal called Roller: it relies on a search procedure that uses a dynamic flattening technique to explore the context of the nodes that provide the information to be extracted; it is configured with an open catalogue of features, so that it can adapt to the evolution of the Web; it also requires a base learner and a rule scorer, which helps it benefit from the continuous advances in machine learning. Our experiments confirm that it outperforms other state-of-the-art proposals in terms of effectiveness and that it is very competitive in terms of efficiency; we have also confirmed that our conclusions are solid from a statistical point of view.