A General Information Extraction Framework Based on Formal Languages

Abstract

For a terminal alphabet $\Sigma$ and an attribute alphabet $\Gamma$, a $(\Sigma, \Gamma)$-extractor is a function that maps every string over $\Sigma$ to a table with a column per attribute and with sets of positions of $w$ as cell entries. This rather general information extraction framework extends the well-known document spanner framework, which has intensively been investigated in the database theory community over the last decade. Moreover, our framework is based on formal language theory in a particularly clean and simple way. In addition to this conceptual contribution, we investigate closure properties, different representation formalisms and the complexity of natural decision problems for extractors.