31 research outputs found
Web Content Extraction - a Meta-Analysis of its Past and Thoughts on its Future
In this paper, we present a meta-analysis of several Web content extraction
algorithms, and make recommendations for the future of content extraction on
the Web. First, we find that nearly all Web content extractors do not consider
a very large, and growing, portion of modern Web pages. Second, it is well
understood that wrapper induction extractors tend to break as the Web changes;
heuristic/feature engineering extractors were thought to be immune to a Web
site's evolution, but we find that this is not the case: heuristic content
extractor performance also tends to degrade over time due to the evolution of
Web site forms and practices. We conclude with recommendations for future work
that address these and other findings.Comment: Accepted for publication in SIGKDD Exploration
Compositional Semantic Parsing on Semi-Structured Tables
Two important aspects of semantic parsing for question answering are the
breadth of the knowledge source and the depth of logical compositionality.
While existing work trades off one aspect for another, this paper
simultaneously makes progress on both fronts through a new task: answering
complex questions on semi-structured tables using question-answer pairs as
supervision. The central challenge arises from two compounding factors: the
broader domain results in an open-ended set of relations, and the deeper
compositionality results in a combinatorial explosion in the space of logical
forms. We propose a logical-form driven parsing algorithm guided by strong
typing constraints and show that it obtains significant improvements over
natural baselines. For evaluation, we created a new dataset of 22,033 complex
questions on Wikipedia tables, which is made publicly available
Table2Vec: Neural Word and Entity Embeddings for Table Population and Retrieval
Tables contain valuable knowledge in a structured form. We employ neural
language modeling approaches to embed tabular data into vector spaces.
Specifically, we consider different table elements, such caption, column
headings, and cells, for training word and entity embeddings. These embeddings
are then utilized in three particular table-related tasks, row population,
column population, and table retrieval, by incorporating them into existing
retrieval models as additional semantic similarity signals. Evaluation results
show that table embeddings can significantly improve upon the performance of
state-of-the-art baselines.Comment: Proceedings of the 42nd International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '19), 201
On-the-fly Table Generation
Many information needs revolve around entities, which would be better
answered by summarizing results in a tabular format, rather than presenting
them as a ranked list. Unlike previous work, which is limited to retrieving
existing tables, we aim to answer queries by automatically compiling a table in
response to a query. We introduce and address the task of on-the-fly table
generation: given a query, generate a relational table that contains relevant
entities (as rows) along with their key properties (as columns). This problem
is decomposed into three specific subtasks: (i) core column entity ranking,
(ii) schema determination, and (iii) value lookup. We employ a feature-based
approach for entity ranking and schema determination, combining deep semantic
features with task-specific signals. We further show that these two subtasks
are not independent of each other and can assist each other in an iterative
manner. For value lookup, we combine information from existing tables and a
knowledge base. Using two sets of entity-oriented queries, we evaluate our
approach both on the component level and on the end-to-end table generation
task.Comment: The 41st International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and
Development in Information Retrieva
Finding Patterns in a Knowledge Base using Keywords to Compose Table Answers
We aim to provide table answers to keyword queries against knowledge bases.
For queries referring to multiple entities, like "Washington cities population"
and "Mel Gibson movies", it is better to represent each relevant answer as a
table which aggregates a set of entities or entity-joins within the same table
scheme or pattern. In this paper, we study how to find highly relevant patterns
in a knowledge base for user-given keyword queries to compose table answers. A
knowledge base can be modeled as a directed graph called knowledge graph, where
nodes represent entities in the knowledge base and edges represent the
relationships among them. Each node/edge is labeled with type and text. A
pattern is an aggregation of subtrees which contain all keywords in the texts
and have the same structure and types on node/edges. We propose efficient
algorithms to find patterns that are relevant to the query for a class of
scoring functions. We show the hardness of the problem in theory, and propose
path-based indexes that are affordable in memory. Two query-processing
algorithms are proposed: one is fast in practice for small queries (with small
patterns as answers) by utilizing the indexes; and the other one is better in
theory, with running time linear in the sizes of indexes and answers, which can
handle large queries better. We also conduct extensive experimental study to
compare our approaches with a naive adaption of known techniques.Comment: VLDB 201