2D correlative-chain conditional random fields for semantic annotation of web objects

Semantic annotation of Web objects is a key problem for Web information extraction. The Web contains an abundance of useful semi-structured information about real world objects, and the empirical study shows that strong two-dimensional sequence characteristics and correlative characteristics exist for Web information about objects of the same type across different Web sites. Conditional Random Fields (CRFs) are the state-of-the-art approaches taking the sequence characteristics to do better labeling. However, as the appearance of correlative characteristics between Web object elements, previous CRFs have their limitations for semantic annotation of Web objects and cannot deal with the long distance dependencies between Web object elements efficiently. To better incorporate the long distance dependencies, on one hand, this paper describes long distance dependencies by correlative edges, which are built by making good use of structured information and the characteristics of records from external databases; and on the other hand, this paper presents a two-dimensional Correlative-Chain Conditional Random Fields (2DCC-CRFs) to do semantic annotation of Web objects. This approach extends a classic model, two-dimensional Conditional Random Fields (2DCRFs), by adding correlative edges. Experimental results using a large number of real-world data collected from diverse domains show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the semantic annotation accuracy of Web objects.