1999 Reports

Extracting Relations from Large Plain-Text Collections

Agichtein, Eugene; Gravano, Luis

Text documents often contain valuable structured data that is hidden in regular English sentences. This data is best exploited if available as a relational table that we could use for answering precise queriesor for running data mining tasks. We explore a technique for extracting such tables from document collections that requires only a handful of training examples from users. These examples are used to generate extraction patterns,that in turn result in new tuples being extracted from the document collection. We build on this idea and present our Snowball system. Snowball introduces novel strategies for generating patterns and extracting tuples from plain-text documents. At each iteration of the extraction process, Snowball evaluates the quality of these patterns and tuples without human intervention,In this paper we also develop a scalable evaluation methodology and metrics for our task, and present a thorough experimental evaluation of Snowball and comparable techniques over a collection of more than 300,000 newspaper documents.