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Statistical machine learning techniques, while well proven in fields such as speech recognition, are just beginning to be applied to the information extraction domain. We explore the use of hidden Markov models for information extraction tasks, specifically focusing on how to learn model structure from data and how to make the best use of labeled and unlabeled data. We show that a manually-constructed model that contains multiple states per extraction field outperforms a model with one state per field, and discuss strategies for learning the model structure automatically from data. We also demonstrate that the use of distantly-labeled data to set model parameters provides a significant improvement in extraction accuracy. Our models are applied to the task of extracting important fields from the headers of computer science research papers, and achieve an extraction accuracy of 92.9%. Introduction Hidden Markov modeling is a powerful statistical machine learning technique that is just ...

Classification trees are widely used in the machine learning and data mining communities for modeling propositional data. Recent work has extended this basic paradigm to probability estimation trees. Traditional tree learning algorithms assume that instances in the training data are homogenous and independently distributed. Relational probability trees (RPTs) extend standard probability estimation trees to a relational setting in which data instances are heterogeneous and interdependent. Our algorithm for learning the structure and parameters of an RPT searches over a space of relational features that use aggregation functions (e.g. AVERAGE, MODE, COUNT) to dynamically propositionalize relational data and create binary splits within the RPT. Previous work has identified a number of statistical biases due to characteristics of relational data such as autocorrelation and degree disparity. The RPT algorithm uses a novel form of randomization test to adjust for these biases. On a variety of relational learning tasks, RPTs built using randomization tests are significantly smaller than other models and achieve equivalent, or better, performance. 1.

Instance independence is a critical assumption of traditional machine learning methods contradicted by many relational datasets. For example, in scientific literature datasets there are dependencies among the references of a paper. Recent work on graphical models for relational data has demonstrated significant performance gains for models that exploit the dependencies among instances. In this paper, we present relational dependency networks (RDNs), a new form of graphical model capable of reasoning with such dependencies in a relational setting. We describe the details of RDN models and outline their strengths, most notably the ability to learn and reason with cyclic relational dependencies. We present RDN models learned on a number of real-world datasets, and evaluate the models in a classification context, showing significant performance improvements. In addition, we use synthetic data to evaluate the quality of model learning and inference procedures. 1.

this paper, we present relational dependency networks (RDNs), extending recent work in dependency networks to a relational setting

This paper evaluates several modifications of the Simple Bayesian Classifier to enable estimation and inference over relational data. The resulting Relational Bayesian Classifiers are evaluated on three real-world datasets and compared to a baseline SBC using no relational information

Abstract. The presence of autocorrelation provides strong motivation for using relational techniques for learning and inference. Autocorrelation is a statistical dependency between the values of the same variable on related entities and is a nearly ubiquitous characteristic of relational data sets. Recent research has explored the use of collective inference techniques to exploit this phenomenon. These techniques achieve significant performance gains by modeling observed correlations among class labels of related instances, but the models fail to capture a frequent cause of autocorrelation—the presence of underlying groups that influence the attributes on a set of entities. We propose a latent group model (LGM) for relational data, which discovers and exploits the hidden structures responsible for the observed autocorrelation among class labels. Modeling the latent group structure improves model performance, increases inference efficiency, and enhances our understanding of the datasets. We evaluate performance on three relational classification tasks and show that LGM outperforms models that ignore latent group structure when there is little known information with which to seed inference.

Recent work on graphical models for relational data has demonstrated significant improvements in classification and inference when models represent the dependencies among instances. Despite its use in conventional statistical models, the assumption of instance independence is contradicted by most relational datasets. For example, in citation data there are dependencies among the topics of a paper’s references, and in genomic data there are dependencies among the functions of interacting proteins. In this paper, we present relational dependency networks (RDNs), graphical models that are capable of expressing and reasoning with such dependencies in a relational setting. We discuss RDNs in the context of relational Bayes networks and relational Markov networks and outline the relative strengths of RDNs—namely, the ability to represent cyclic dependencies, simple methods for parameter estimation, and efficient structure learning techniques. The strengths of RDNs are due to the use of pseudolikelihood learning techniques, which estimate an efficient approximation of the full joint distribution. We present learned RDNs for a number of real-world datasets and evaluate the models in a prediction context, showing that RDNs identify and exploit cyclic relational dependencies to achieve significant performance gains over conventional conditional models. In addition, we use synthetic data to explore model performance under various relational data characteristics, showing that RDN learning and inference techniques are accurate over a wide range of conditions.

Topical crawlers are increasingly seen as a way to address the scalability limitations of universal search engines, by distributing the crawling process across users, queries, or even client computers. The context available to such crawlers can guide the navigation of links with the goal of efficiently locating highly relevant target pages. We developed a framework to fairly evaluate topical crawling algorithms under a number of performance metrics. Such a framework is employed here to evaluate different algorithms that have proven highly competitive among those proposed in the literature and in our own previous research. In particular we focus on the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation of the cues available to a crawler, and on adaptive crawlers that use machine learning techniques to guide their search. We find that the best performance is achieved by a novel combination of explorative and exploitative bias, and introduce an evolutionary crawler that surpasses the performance of the best non-adaptive crawler after sufficiently long crawls. We also analyze the computational complexity of the various crawlers and discuss how performance and complexity scale with available resources. Evolutionary crawlers achieve high efficiency and scalability by distributing the work across concurrent agents, resulting in the best performance/cost ratio.

The applicability of many current information extraction techniques is severely limited by the need for supervised training data. We demonstrate that for certain field structured extraction tasks, such as classified advertisements and bibliographic citations, small amounts of prior knowledge can be used to learn effective models in a primarily unsupervised fashion. Although hidden Markov models (HMMs) provide a suitable generative model for field structured text, general unsupervised HMM learning fails to learn useful structure in either of our domains. However, one can dramatically improve the quality of the learned structure by exploiting simple prior knowledge of the desired solutions. In both domains, we found that unsupervised methods can attain accuracies with 400 unlabeled examples comparable to those attained by supervised methods on 50 labeled examples, and that semi-supervised methods can make good use of small amounts of labeled data. 1