Section: Overall Objectives

Presentation

The objective of Mostrare is to develop adaptive document processing methods for XML -based information systems. Adaptiveness becomes important when documents evolve frequently such as on the Web. The particularity of Mostrare is that we develop semi-automatic or automatic information extraction approaches that can fully benefit from the available tree structure of XML documents.

Information extraction is an instance of document transformation. In order to exploit the tree structure of XML documents, our goal is to investigate specification languages for tree transformations. These are based on approaches from database theory (such as the W3C standards XQuery and XSLT), automata, logic, and programming languages. We wish to define stochastic models of tree transformations, and to develop automatic or semi-automatic procedures for inferring them. Once available, we want to integrate these learning algorithms into innovative information extraction systems, semantic Web platforms, and document processing engines.

The following two paragraphs summarize our two main research objectives:

Modeling tree structures for information extraction.

We wish to continue our work on modeling languages for node selection queries in tree structured documents, that we contributed in the first phase of Mostrare. The new subject of interest of the second phase are XML document transformations and tree transformations that generalize on node selection queries.

Machine learning for information extraction.

We wish to continue to study machine learning techniques for information extraction. One new goal is to develop learning algorithms that can induce XML document transformations, based on their tree structure. Another new goal is to explore stochastic machine learning techniques that can deal with uncertainty in document sources.