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Grammars for Document Spanners

Author Liat Peterfreund

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Author Details

Liat Peterfreund
  • DI ENS, ENS, CNRS, PSL University, Paris, France
  • Inria, Paris, France

Funding

  • Peterfreund, Liat: A part of this work was done while affiliated with IRIF - CNRS & Université de Paris, Paris, France, and with University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK. This work is supported by the Fondation des Sciences Mathématiques de Paris (FSMP).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their extremely valuable comments, and in particular those that enabled me to extend the enumeration algorithm to a broader class of extraction grammars. I am grateful to Arnaud Durand, Michael Kaminski, Benny Kimelfeld, and Leonid Libkin for useful discussions, and to Dominik D. Freydenberger for references.

Cite As Get BibTex

Liat Peterfreund. Grammars for Document Spanners. In 24th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2021). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 186, pp. 7:1-7:18, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2021.7

Abstract

We propose a new grammar-based language for defining information-extractors from documents (text) that is built upon the well-studied framework of document spanners for extracting structured data from text. While previously studied formalisms for document spanners are mainly based on regular expressions, we use an extension of context-free grammars, called {extraction grammars}, to define the new class of context-free spanners. Extraction grammars are simply context-free grammars extended with variables that capture interval positions of the document, namely spans. While regular expressions are efficient for tokenizing and tagging, context-free grammars are also efficient for capturing structural properties. Indeed, we show that context-free spanners are strictly more expressive than their regular counterparts. We reason about the expressive power of our new class and present a pushdown-automata model that captures it. We show that extraction grammars can be evaluated with polynomial data complexity. Nevertheless, as the degree of the polynomial depends on the query, we present an enumeration algorithm for unambiguous extraction grammars that, after quintic preprocessing, outputs the results sequentially, without repetitions, with a constant delay between every two consecutive ones.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Information systems → Information extraction
  • Information systems → Relational database model
  • Information systems → Data model extensions
Keywords
  • Information Extraction
  • Document Spanners
  • Context-Free Grammars
  • Constant-Delay Enumeration
  • Regular Expressions
  • Pushdown Automata

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