OpenCeres: When Open Information Extraction Meets the Semi-Structured Web

Open Information Extraction (OpenIE), the problem of harvesting triples from natural language text whose predicate relations are not aligned to any pre-defined ontology, has been a popular subject of research for the last decade. However, this research has largely ignored the vast quantity of facts available in semi-structured webpages. In this paper, we define the problem of OpenIE from semi-structured websites to extract such facts, and present an approach for solving it. We also introduce a labeled evaluation dataset to motivate research in this area. Given a semi-structured website and a set of seed facts for some relations existing on its pages, we employ a semi-supervised label propagation technique to automatically create training data for the relations present on the site. We then use this training data to learn a classifier for relation extraction. Experimental results of this method on our new benchmark dataset obtained a precision of over 70. A larger scale extraction experiment on 31 websites in the movie vertical resulted in the extraction of over 2 million triples.