Learning to extract information from semi-structured text using a discriminative context free grammar

In recent work, conditional Markov chain models (CMM) have been used to extract information from semi-structured text (one example is the Conditional Random Field [10]). Applications range from finding the author and title in research papers to finding the phone number and street address in a web page. The CMM framework combines a priori knowledge encoded as features with a set of labeled training data to learn an efficient extraction process. We will show that similar problems can be solved more effectively by learning a discriminative context free grammar from training data. The grammar has several distinct advantages: long range, even global, constraints can be used to disambiguate entity labels; training data is used more efficiently; and a set of new more powerful features can be introduced. The grammar based approach also results in semantic information (encoded in the form of a parse tree) which could be used for IR applications like question answering. The specific problem we consider is of extracting personal contact, or address, information from unstructured sources such as documents and emails. While linear-chain CMMs perform reasonably well on this task, we show that a statistical parsing approach results in a 50% reduction in error rate. This system also has the advantage of being interactive, similar to the system described in [9]. In cases where there are multiple errors, a single user correction can be propagated to correct multiple errors automatically. Using a discriminatively trained grammar, 93.71% of all tokens are labeled correctly (compared to 88.43% for a CMM) and 72.87% of records have all tokens labeled correctly (compared to 45.29% for the CMM).