Domain-specific information extraction structures

Abstract

Information describing an event can frequently be found on several Web pages, each of which is often poorly structured and incomplete; the set of pages is typically repetitive, often contradictory and verbose. In order to deliver high quality information to a variety of devices in different contexts and roles, we need to provide information that is more succinct. Our approach to this problem is to use domain-specific templates to extract information selectively from the original pages into XML documents, which act as a canonical structure. The extracted information can then be transformed into a form suitable for the intended application. A further series of output transformations are then applied to format the information appropriately, e.g. as speech, simple text or published on the web. We illustrate our approach with an application in reporting soccer matches.