Set of t-uples expansion by example

Abstract

Set expansion is the task of finding elements of a set given example members. We are interested in the design of algorithms and techniques for a set expansion tool that expands a set by searching, finding and extracting candidates from the World Wide Web. Existing approaches mostly consider sets of atomic data. We extend this idea to the expansion of sets of t-uples, that is relation instances or tables. We propose an approach for extracting relation instances from the World Wide Web given a handful set of t-uple seeds. For instance, when the user proposes the set of seeds , , the system returns a relation containing currency codes with their corresponding country and capital city. We show how a random walk in a heterogeneous graph of Web pages, wrappers, seeds and candidates is able to rank the candidates according to their relevance to the seeds. We evaluate the performance of the approach and show that it is efficient, effective and practical.