License: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0)
When quoting this document, please refer to the following
DOI: 10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2021.7
URN: urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-137154
URL: http://dagstuhl.sunsite.rwth-aachen.de/volltexte/2021/13715/
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Peterfreund, Liat

Grammars for Document Spanners

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LIPIcs-ICDT-2021-7.pdf (0.8 MB)

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.

BibTeX - Entry

@InProceedings{peterfreund:LIPIcs.ICDT.2021.7,
  author =	{Peterfreund, Liat},
  title =	{{Grammars for Document Spanners}},
  booktitle =	{24th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2021)},
  pages =	{7:1--7:18},
  series =	{Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)},
  ISBN =	{978-3-95977-179-5},
  ISSN =	{1868-8969},
  year =	{2021},
  volume =	{186},
  editor =	{Yi, Ke and Wei, Zhewei},
  publisher =	{Schloss Dagstuhl -- Leibniz-Zentrum f{\"u}r Informatik},
  address =	{Dagstuhl, Germany},
  URL =		{https://drops.dagstuhl.de/opus/volltexte/2021/13715},
  URN =		{urn:nbn:de:0030-drops-137154},
  doi =		{10.4230/LIPIcs.ICDT.2021.7},
  annote =	{Keywords: Information Extraction, Document Spanners, Context-Free Grammars, Constant-Delay Enumeration, Regular Expressions, Pushdown Automata}
}

Keywords: Information Extraction, Document Spanners, Context-Free Grammars, Constant-Delay Enumeration, Regular Expressions, Pushdown Automata
Collection: 24th International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2021)
Issue Date: 2021
Date of publication: 11.03.2021

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