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Automatic segmentation of text into structured records

Published 1 May 2001
Vinayak Borkar, Kaustubh Deshmukh, Sunita Sarawagi
Citations212

TL;DR

A tool DATAMOLD is described that learns to automatically extract structure when seeded with a small number of training examples and enhances on Hidden Markov Models (HMM) to build a powerful probabilistic model that corroborates multiple sources of information.

Abstract

In this paper we present a method for automatically segmenting unformatted text records into structured elements. Several useful data sources today are human-generated as continuous text whereas convenient usage requires the data to be organized as structured records. A prime motivation is the warehouse address cleaning problem of transforming dirty addresses stored in large corporate databases as a single text field into subfields like "City" and "Street". Existing tools rely on hand-tuned, domain-specific rule-based systems.

Keywords

Computer ScienceDecision Sciences