An Annotated Corpus and Method for Analysis of Ad-Hoc Structures Embedded in Text

Eric Yeh, John Niekrasz, Dayne Freitag, Richard Rohwer


Abstract
We describe a method for identifying and performing functional analysis of structured regions that are embedded in natural language documents, such as tables or key-value lists. Such regions often encode information according to ad hoc schemas and avail themselves of visual cues in place of natural language grammar, presenting problems for standard information extraction algorithms. Unlike previous work in table extraction, which assumes a relatively noiseless two-dimensional layout, our aim is to accommodate a wide variety of naturally occurring structure types. Our approach has three main parts. First, we collect and annotate a a diverse sample of “naturally” occurring structures from several sources. Second, we use probabilistic text segmentation techniques, featurized by skip bigrams over spatial and token category cues, to automatically identify contiguous regions of structured text that share a common schema. Finally, we identify the records and fields within each structured region using a combination of distributional similarity and sequence alignment methods, guided by minimal supervision in the form of a single annotated record. We evaluate the last two components individually, and conclude with a discussion of further work.
Anthology ID:
L16-1327
Volume:
Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16)
Month:
May
Year:
2016
Address:
Portorož, Slovenia
Editors:
Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Sara Goggi, Marko Grobelnik, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Helene Mazo, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, Stelios Piperidis
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association (ELRA)
Note:
Pages:
2063–2070
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1327
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eric Yeh, John Niekrasz, Dayne Freitag, and Richard Rohwer. 2016. An Annotated Corpus and Method for Analysis of Ad-Hoc Structures Embedded in Text. In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'16), pages 2063–2070, Portorož, Slovenia. European Language Resources Association (ELRA).
Cite (Informal):
An Annotated Corpus and Method for Analysis of Ad-Hoc Structures Embedded in Text (Yeh et al., LREC 2016)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/L16-1327.pdf