23,636 research outputs found
Inference of Regular Expressions for Text Extraction from Examples
A large class of entity extraction tasks from text that is either semistructured or fully unstructured may be addressed by regular expressions, because in many practical cases the relevant entities follow an underlying syntactical pattern and this pattern may be described by a regular expression. In this work we consider the long-standing problem of synthesizing such expressions automatically, based solely on examples of the desired behavior. We present the design and implementation of a system capable of addressing extraction tasks of realistic complexity. Our system is based on an evolutionary procedure carefully tailored to the specific needs of regular expression generation by examples. The procedure executes a search driven by a multiobjective optimization strategy aimed at simultaneously improving multiple performance indexes of candidate solutions while at the same time ensuring an adequate exploration of the huge solution space. We assess our proposal experimentally in great depth, on a number of challenging datasets. The accuracy of the obtained solutions seems to be adequate for practical usage and improves over earlier proposals significantly. Most importantly, our results are highly competitive even with respect to human operators. A prototype is available as a web application at http://regex.inginf.units.it
A Grammatical Inference Approach to Language-Based Anomaly Detection in XML
False-positives are a problem in anomaly-based intrusion detection systems.
To counter this issue, we discuss anomaly detection for the eXtensible Markup
Language (XML) in a language-theoretic view. We argue that many XML-based
attacks target the syntactic level, i.e. the tree structure or element content,
and syntax validation of XML documents reduces the attack surface. XML offers
so-called schemas for validation, but in real world, schemas are often
unavailable, ignored or too general. In this work-in-progress paper we describe
a grammatical inference approach to learn an automaton from example XML
documents for detecting documents with anomalous syntax.
We discuss properties and expressiveness of XML to understand limits of
learnability. Our contributions are an XML Schema compatible lexical datatype
system to abstract content in XML and an algorithm to learn visibly pushdown
automata (VPA) directly from a set of examples. The proposed algorithm does not
require the tree representation of XML, so it can process large documents or
streams. The resulting deterministic VPA then allows stream validation of
documents to recognize deviations in the underlying tree structure or
datatypes.Comment: Paper accepted at First Int. Workshop on Emerging Cyberthreats and
Countermeasures ECTCM 201
Ontologies and Information Extraction
This report argues that, even in the simplest cases, IE is an ontology-driven
process. It is not a mere text filtering method based on simple pattern
matching and keywords, because the extracted pieces of texts are interpreted
with respect to a predefined partial domain model. This report shows that
depending on the nature and the depth of the interpretation to be done for
extracting the information, more or less knowledge must be involved. This
report is mainly illustrated in biology, a domain in which there are critical
needs for content-based exploration of the scientific literature and which
becomes a major application domain for IE
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