Diadem 1.0

DIADEMDomain-centric, Intelligent, Automated

Data ExtractionTim Furche, Georg Gottlob, Giorgio Orsi

May 11th, 2011 @ Oxford University Computing Laboratoriesjoint work with Giovanni Grasso, Omer Gunes, Xiaonan Guo, Andrey Kravchenko, Thomas

Lukasiewicz, Christian Schallhart, Andrew Sellers, Gerardo Simaris, Cheng Wang

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Web Data Extraction

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Section 1: Web Data Extraction

Data on the Web

there is more of it than we can use

no longer availability, but finding, integrating, analysing, …

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Surface vs. Deep Web

estimated 500 × surface web

estimated 400 000 deep web databases

What?

Products (stores)

Directories (yellow pages)

Catalogs (libraries)

Public DBs (publications, census, data.gov,…)

Public services (weather, location, …)

6And it’s not just one haystack …

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7 bedrooms

5 bedrooms

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The Web is more than HTML

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Overview

Introducing Web Data Extraction

Scenarios

Why now?

Supervised Web Data Extraction

Unsupervised Web Data Extraction

DIADEM

OPAL

AMBER

OXPath

IVLIA

Datalog±

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1.1

Web Data Extraction: Scenarios

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The Need of Web Data Extraction

information

drives business (decision making, trend analysis, …)

available in troves on the internet

but: as HTML made for humans, not as structured data

companies need

product specifications

pricing information

market trends

regulatory information

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keyword search fails

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Scenario ➀: Electronics retailer

electronics retailer: online market intelligence

comprehensive overview of the market

daily information on price, shipping costs, trends, product mix

by product, geographical region, or competitor

thousands of products

hundreds of competitors

nowadays: specialised companies

mostly manual, interpolation

large cost

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Scenario ➁: Supermarket chain

supermarket chain

competitors’ product prices

special offer or promotion (time sensitive)

new products, product formats & packaging

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Scenario ➂: Hotel Agency

online travel agency

best price guarantee

prices of competing agencies

average market price

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Scenario ➃: Hedge Fund

house price index

published in regular intervals by national statistics agency

affects share values of various industries

hedge fund

online market intelligence to predict the house price index

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And a lot more …

monitor blogs and forums

market intelligence, e.g., complaints, common problems

customer opinions

ranking and analysing product reviews

financial analysts

monitor trends and stats for products of a certain company / category

interest rates from financial institutions

press releases and financial reports

patent search & analysis

…

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1.1

Web Data Extraction: Why Now?

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Scale

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Applications

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How to book a flight?

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Structured Data

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Why Web Data Extraction Now?

Why now? Trends

Trend ➊: scale—every business is online

automation at scale

Trend ➋: web applications rather than web documents

automated form filling (deep web navigation)

Trend ➌: structured, common-sense data available

allows more sophisticated automated analysis

also a tool for improved data extraction?

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Web Data Extraction: Supervised

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manual: (e.g., Web Harvest)

user writes the wrapper, sometimes using wrapping libraries

supervised: (e.g., Lixto)

user provides examples and refines the wrapper

semi-supervised:

user provides examples (per site), wrapper is automatically learned

unsupervised: entirely automated (e.g., DIADEM)

some systems omit examples and run analysis directly on all pages

some systems automatically guess examples

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Section 2: Supervised Web Data Extraction

Supervised Web Data Extraction

User interaction needed to

rather than manually writing in a programming language

record interaction sequences (such as form fillings)

visually select examples for data

Current gold standard for high-accuracy extraction

Examples:

Lixto

Automation Anywhere

Web Harvest

…

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Section 1: Supervised Web Data Extraction

Lixto: Extraction & Analysis

Lixto: sophisticated, visual semi-automated extraction tool

visually select, automatically derives patterns, verification

highly scalable extraction and processing with Lixto server

but also: data integration & business analytics suite

data cleaning

data flow scenarios: merge & filter from different web sites

market intelligence & analytics

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Web Data Extraction: Unsupervised

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17000 real estate sites in the UK

alone

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Section 3: Unsupervised Web Data Extraction

Why Automating Data Extraction?

Too many fish in the pond

> 17 000 real estate UK sites

similar for restaurants, travel, airlines, pharmacies, retail shops, …

aggregators cover only a fraction

updated slowly

⇒ per site manual work infeasible

wrapper construction too expensive

tracking changes

excludes manual & (semi-) supervised

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Why Automating Data Extraction?

All the fish are different

large, modern aggregators (>100000)

nation-wide agencies (>10000)

agencies for single quarter (< 15)

⇒ no single unsupervised wrapper

can do this today

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… and we really need it!

search engine providers (Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!) all work on

information and data extraction for

“vertical”, “object” and “semantic” search

turn search engines into knowledge bases for decision support

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“no one really has done this successfully at scale yet”

Raghu Ramakrishnan, Yahoo!, March 2009

“Current technologies are not good enough yet to provide what search

engines really need. [...] Any successful approach would probably need a combination of knowledge and

learning.”

Alon Halevy, Google, Feb. 2009

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Unsupervised: The Story so Far

Key observation:

“database” web sites are generated using templates

wrapper generators need to automatically identifying templates

Two major approaches

machine learning from a few hand-labeled examples

similar to semi-supervised, but only one set of examples for an entire domain

high precision only for simple domains (single entity type, few attributes)

fully automatically exploit the repeated structure of result pages

good precision needs a lot of data (many records per page, many pages)

doesn’t work for forms (no repetition)

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?

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DIADEM

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Section 4: DIADEM

Domain-Centric Data Extraction

Blackbox analyser that

turns any of the thousands of websites of a domain

into structured data

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host of domain specific annotators

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domain ontology & phenomenology

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+ everything the others are doing

machine learning for classification

template discovery

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Section 4: DIADEM

DIADEM: Overview

DIADEM combines

host of domain-specific annotators with

gives us a first “guess” to automatically generate examples

high-level ontology about domain entities and

their phenomenology on web sites of the domain

allows us to verify & refine examples

+ advances in existing techniques for

repeated structure analysis

page & block classification

bottom-up understanding & top-down reasoning

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4.1

DEMO

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DIADEM 0.1First prototype

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OPAL:Ontologies for Form Analysis

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Diversity

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Section 4: DIADEM » OPAL

OPAL: Overview

Three step process:

browser extraction and annotation

labelling & segmentation

classification (phenomenological mapping)

Model-based, knowledge driven

latter two steps are model transformations

thin layer of domain-dependent concepts

field types and labels

triggers for field & form creation

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79ICQ Data Set: Application to Other Domains

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AMBER:Ontologies for

Record Extraction

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7 bedrooms

5 bedrooms

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just opposite as in OPAL

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AMBER: Overview

Three step process like OPAL

browser extraction and annotation

classification (phenomenological mapping)

record segmentation (much harder than in OPAL)

Model-based, knowledge driven

latter two steps are model transformations

thin layer of domain-dependent concepts

record and attribute types

triggers for record & attribute creation

Section 4: DIADEM » AMBER

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Repeating

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Similarity

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OXPath:Scalable, Memory-

Efficient Web Extraction

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How to book a flight?

Section 4: DIADEM » OXPath

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How to find a flat?


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How to find a flat with OXPath

Start at rightmove.co.uk: doc("rightmove.co.uk")

Fill “oxford’ into the first visible field /descendant::field()[1]/{"oxford"}

Click on the second next button /following::field()[2]/{click /}

On the refinement form just continue by clicking on the last field /descendant::field()[last()]/{click /}

Grab all the prices //p.price


http://www.rightmove.co.uk/

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State of Web Extraction

No interaction with rich, scripted interfaces

no actions other than form filling and submission

➀ Imperative extraction scripts

explicit variable assignments, flow control, etc.

either proprietary selection language or mix of XPath & external flow control

➁ Focus on automation and visual interfaces

no or very limited extraction language, only ad-hoc extractions

no multiway navigation, no optimization


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Summary of Complexity


Time Space

OXPath w/o Actions & Kleene

O( n6⋅q2 ) O( n5⋅q2 )

OXPath w/o Kleene O( (p⋅n)6⋅q3 ) O( n5⋅q3 )

OXPath w/o unbounded Kleene

O( (p⋅n)6⋅q3 ) O( n5⋅q∑3 )

OXPath (full) O( (p⋅n)6⋅q3 ) O( n5⋅(q+d)3 )

O(n4⋅q2) O(n3⋅q2)

Combined: PTime-hard PTime-hard

Data: NLogSpace

LogSpaceExtraction marker = n-ary, nested

queries

Contextual actions (action free prefix)

Actions = multiple pages

Buffer bounded by page depth

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Constant Memory

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even faster

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4.5

IVLIA:Ontologies for PDF Extraction

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PDF Analysis

Section 4: DIADEM » IVLIA

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Semantic Analysis and Annotation

Section 4: DIADEM » IVLIA

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Datalog±:Ontological Reasoning

at Web Scale

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Relational Schemaperson(ssn, name, birthdate)employee (ssn, empID, name, birthdate, department)department (depName, building)project (projID, startDate, duration)supervision (supervisor, supervised)assignment (employee, project)

E/R Schema Object Relational Schema

Ontological Databases

Section 4: DIADEM » Datalog±

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Taxonomy Definitions

employee(X,Y,Z,W) → ∃V person(V,Y,Z)

project(X,Y,Z) → activity(X,Y,Z)

employee(X1,Y1,Z1,W1,U1), supervision(Y1,Y2), employee(X2,Y2,Z2,W2,U2) → supervisor(X1,Y1,Z1,W1,U1)

Concept Definitions

generalManager(X1,Y1,Z1,W1,U1) → supervision(Y1,Y1)

An employee who supervises another employee is a supervisor

A general manager supervises him/herself

Ontological Constraints

Section 4: DIADEM » Datalog±

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efficiency

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expressiveness

expressiveness

DB

efficiency

Big Picture

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Big Picture

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Q&A

diadem-project.info

http://diadem-project.info/oxpath

Technology

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