Understanding tables on the web

摘要: The Web contains a wealth of information, and a key challenge is to make this information machine processable. In this paper, we study how to “understand” HTML tables on the Web, which is one step further from finding the schemas of tables. From 0.3 billion Web documents, we obtain 1.95 billion tables, and 0.5-1% of these contain information of various entities and their properties. We argue that in order for computers to understand these tables, computers must first have a brain – a general purpose knowledge taxonomy that is comprehensive enough to cover the concepts (of worldly facts) in a human mind. Second, we argue that the process of understanding a table is the process of finding the right position for the table in the knowledge taxonomy. Once a table is associated with a concept in the knowledge taxonomy, it will be automatically linked to all other tables that are associated with the same …