Mining web sites using adaptive information extraction

Abstract

Adaptive Information Extraction systems (IES) are currently used by some Semantic Web (SW) annotation tools as support to annotation (Handschuh et al., 2002; Vargas-Vera et al., 2002). They are generally based on fully supervised methodologies requiring fairly intense domain-specific annotation. Unfortunately, selecting representative examples may be difficult and annotations can be incorrect and require time. In this paper we present a methodology that drastically reduce (or even remove) the amount of manual annotation required when annotating consistent sets of pages. A very limited number of user-defined examples are used to bootstrap learning. Simple, high precision (and possibly high recall) IE patterns are induced using such examples, these patterns will then discover more examples which will in turn discover more patterns, etc.