Extracting Relations from XML Documents

C. T. Howard Ho

Joerg GerhardtEugene Agichtein*Vanja Josifovski

IBM Almaden and Columbia University*

2

Extraction for Data Integration: Motivating Example

Productsbooks

item

booktitle

author

publisher

ISBN

Native Schema

Publications

book

title author publisherISBN

External Schema

price

ISBN Title Author Publisher

Price

price

musicvideo

3

Why Extract Data from XML?• XML query processing is still in

development. Still not as fast as RDBMS• Relational query processing is still standard

for many business applications• By extracting into one relational schema,

avoid overhead of XML runtime data integration

• Extracted relations can be best exploited for relatively static data (e.g., product catalogs)

4

Related Work

• XTRACT (induces DTDs)• Lore/DataGuides• HTML Wrappers (LixTo, RoadRunner,

WHISK, STALKER, … )• Plain Text Information Extraction

(Proteus, Snowball, Rapier)• Supervised/Assisted XML Schema

Mapping (e.g., Clio)

5

Outline• Motivation• Problem statement• XMLMiner approach• Training XMLMiner• Extraction from new documents• Some observation from the prototype• Summary

6

Problem Statement• Given a target flat relation R,

extract information for the tuples in R from XML (or HTML) documents, with potentially significant variations in schema.

• Problems with current integration/extraction approaches:– Hard-coding the rules/queries

requires significant effort; The resulting rules can be brittle.

– XML Schema or DTD is not always provided

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XMLMiner Approach• Learn signatures from example XML documents• Represent document structure while

maintaining flexibility (to allow schema variations)• Assume that a tuple in the target relation

corresponds to a subtree rooted at an instance node.  (The subtree may contain more detailed info of the tuple than needed.)

• Represent input document nodes as vectors, and then find the closest (i.e., most similar) instance node vector

• Use labels and data values to map children of the instance node to target tuple attributes

8

XMLMiner Architecture: Training and Extraction

Canonical Tree

Canonical Tree

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High Level Description• Training:

– Each XML document is merged/split to a schema-like tree, called canonical tree

– User identifies the attributes nodes (under instance node), corresponding to the target tuple attributes

– System derives the instance node in the tree– Build a model for the structure of the tuple and each

attribute• Extracting:

– Apply the model to find the most likely instance node and attribute nodes in the new XML documents

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Training Stage I: Create Canonical Tree for each

Example Document

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Canonical Form Conversion Example:Merging Similar Nodes

Products (Root)

Item Item Item Item

Author Title Book Author Year CD Artist Length CD ArtistName

Products (Root)

Item*

Book Author TitleYear CD Artist Length Name

• Merge all siblings with the same label (e.g., Item Item*)

• Intuition: Siblings with the same label represent “similar” entities.

Original Document Structure

“Merged” Document

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Example: Split Heterogeneous Nodes Canonical Form

Products (Root)

Item*

Book Author TitleYear CD Artist Length Name

Products (Root)

Item1* Item2*

Book Author Title Year CD Artist Length Name

Node\Tag Book Author Title Year CD Artist Length Name Item1 1 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 Item2 1 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 Item3 0 0 0 0 1 1 1 0 Item4 0 0 0 0 1 1 0 1

Canonical Tree:

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Training Stage I Result: Canonical Tree

Products (Root)

Item Item Item Item

Book Author Title Book Author Year CD Artist Length CD ArtistName

Products (Root)

Item1* Item2*

Book Author Title Year CD Artist Length Name

OriginalDocument:

Canonical Form:

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Training Stage II: Generate Instance Node Signatures• Features used to create

signatures for an instance node I (item) in the canonical tree: – A: Ancestors of I– S: Siblings of I– C: Descendants of I– I: Self: Tag of I

• Siblings and Ancestors position of I in the document

• The Descendants : internal structure of I

Products

Books

Item

Title Author Publisher

Used

ISBN Price Num_Copies

New

Category_Desc

Ancestors

Descendants

Instance Siblings

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Training Stage (cont.):Example Instance Node Signature

Signature (A,S,C,I) for Item :

[ A: { “Products”, “Books”}, S: { “Category_Desc”}, C: { “Title”, “Author”, “Publisher”, “New”, “Used”, “ISBN”, “Price”, “Num_Copies” } I: {“Item”}]

Products

Books

Item

Title Author Publisher

Used

ISBN Price Num_Copies

New

Category_Desc

Ancestors

Descendants

Instance Siblings

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Signature Similarity• Vector Space model, TF*IDF weights for

terms• Incorporates structure (similarity-by-

region)SX: [ A: { “Products”:1, }, S: { “Music”:0.33, “Video”:0.33}, C: { “Title”:0.33, “Author”:0.33, “Publisher”:0.33, “New”:0.2, “Used”:0.2, “ISBN”:0.6, “Price”:0.2, “Copies”:0.5 }, I: {“Item”} ]

SY:[ A: { “Products”:1, “Books”:0.5},

S: { “CDs”:0.5}, C: { “Title”:0.33, “Author”:0.33,

“Publisher”:0.33, “ISBN”:0.6, “Price”:0.2, “Copies”:0.5 }, I: {“Book”} ]Similarity(SX, SY) = SX.A * SY.A + SX.S *

SY.S + +SX.C * SY.C + SX.I * SY.I

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Training Stage III: Attribute Signatures

• Structural + Data signature S(D, A, S, C, I)– 1: Data signature D for the values of R.X

(e.g., can be a histogram of values for X)– Structure signature for attribute X: (A; S; C; I ):

• Similar to instance signature• Original instance node

“document” root, • A ancestors

(Item, Publisher, New)• I self (ISBN)• S siblings

(Price, NumCopies)• C null.

Item

Author Publisher

Used

ISBN Price Num_Copies

ISBN BookTitle Author Price

New

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Outline• Motivation• Problem statement• XMLMiner approach• Training XMLMiner• Extraction from new documents• XMLMiner prototype• Summary

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Extraction Stage1. Assumption: Input documents have

internal regularity2. Compute canonical tree for some of

the input documents3. Build signature of each node in the

canonical form, and compute similarity with known instance node signatures

4. Map descendants of highest scoring node to attributes of target table using attribute signatures

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Extraction I: Represent test documents in canonical form

Publications

bookbooktitleauthorpublisher

price

editor

Test Document Canonical Form

ISBN

book*titleauthorpublisher

price

editor

ISBN

Publications

Intuition:• Robustness (allows “optional” nodes)• Efficiency: Canonical form has fewer nodes that original tree

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Extraction II: Find Instance Node in Canonical Tree

• For each node K in CT•Compute Signature of K SK

•Compute score for K as Similarity( SK , SI )

• SI is the signature of instance node I from training

• The node with highest score is the instance node in CT

book*titleauthorpublisher

price

editor

ISBN

Publications

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Extraction III: Map children of instance node to attributes

• For each node J of subtree at K•For each attribute X of R

•ASJ Attribute Signature of J•ASX Attribute Signature of X•Compute score for J as Similarity( ASJ , ASX )

•Pick mapping such that Product of the scores over attributes of R is maximized.

book*titleauthorpublisher

price

editor

ISBN

23

Extraction IV: Generate XPath queries for the new documents

• Apply XPath queries to the “new” XML documents

• Simple XPath queries can be handled by Xerces parser or more advanced “streaming parser”

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XMLMiner Prototype

Successfully finds best instance node (“Book”) in test document

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Summary• Partially supervised, low effort XML

relational extraction• Flexible vector space representation

that preserves some original structure• Can potentially be more robust than

current state-of-the-art systems that rely on rules