Tree pattern inference and matching for wrapper induction on the World Wide Web

We develop a method for learning patterns from a set of positive examples to retrieve semantic content from tree-structured data. Specifically, we focus on HTML documents on the World Wide Web, which contain a wealth of semantic information and have a useful underlying tree structure. A user provides examples of relevant data they wish to extract from a web site through a simple user interface in a web browser. To construct patterns, we use the notion of the edit distance between the subtrees represented by these examples to distill them into a more general pattern. This pattern may then be used to retrieve other instances of the selected data from the same page or other similar pages. By linking patterns and their components with semantic labels using RDF, we can create semantic "overlays" for Web information which are useful in such projects as the Semantic Web and the Haystack information management environment.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2004

Author dc:creator

• Hogue, Andrew William, 1978-

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David R. Karger.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

en_US

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/28406

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/28406