Set of tuples expansion by example with reliability

Abstract

Purpose This paper aims to focus on the design of algorithms and techniques for an effective set expansion. A tool that finds and extracts candidate sets of tuples from the World Wide Web was designed and implemented. For instance, when a given user provides <Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesian Rupiah>, <China, Beijing, Yuan Renminbi>, <Canada, Ottawa, Canadian Dollar> as seeds, our system returns tuples composed of countries with their corresponding capital cities and currency names constructed from content extracted from Web pages retrieved. Design/methodology/approach The seeds are used to query a search engine and to retrieve relevant Web pages. The seeds are also used to infer wrappers from the retrieved pages. The wrappers, in turn, are used to extract candidates. The Web pages, wrappers, seeds and candidates, as well as their relationships, are vertices and edges of a heterogeneous graph. Several options for ranking candidates from PageRank to truth finding algorithms were evaluated and compared. Remarkably, all vertices are ranked, thus providing an integrated approach to not only answer direct set expansion questions but also find the most relevant pages to expand a given set of seeds. Findings The experimental results show that leveraging the truth finding algorithm can indeed improve the level of confidence in the extracted candidates and the sources. Originality/value Current approaches on set expansion mostly support sets of atomic data expansion. This idea can be extended to the sets of tuples and extract relation instances from the Web given a handful set of tuple seeds. A truth finding algorithm is also incorporated into the approach and it is shown that it can improve the confidence level in the ranking of both candidates and sources in set of tuples expansion.