Pooling Hybrid Representations for Web Structured Data Annotation

TL;DR

This paper introduces a hybrid deep learning model combining CNN and RNN to automatically classify web structured data attributes based on their values, outperforming previous methods without pre-processing.

Contribution

The novel hybrid deep learning network effectively captures sequence features of attribute values for data annotation without pre-processing or handcrafted features.

Findings

Outperforms previous approaches in four web domains

Effectively captures short- and long-distance dependencies in data sequences

Eliminates need for pre-processing or handcrafted features

Abstract

Automatically identifying data types of web structured data is a key step in the process of web data integration. Web structured data is usually associated with entities or objects in a particular domain. In this paper, we aim to map attributes of an entity in a given domain to pre-specified classes of attributes in the same domain based on their values. To perform this task, we propose a hybrid deep learning network that relies on the format of the attributes' values. It does so without any pre-processing or using pre-defined hand-crafted features. The hybrid network combines sequence-based neural networks, namely convolutional neural networks (CNN) and recurrent neural networks (RNN), to learn the sequence structure of attributes' values. The CNN captures short-distance dependencies in these sequences through a sliding window approach, and the RNN captures long-distance dependencies by storing information of previous characters. These networks create different vector representations of the input sequence which are combined using a pooling layer. This layer applies a specific operation on these vectors in order to capture their most useful patterns for the task. Finally, on top of the pooling layer, a softmax function predicts the label of a given attribute value. We evaluate our strategy in four different web domains. The results show that the pooling network outperforms previous approaches, which use some kind of input pre-processing, in all domains.