TAPON-MT: a versatile framework for semantic labelling

Abstract

Semantic labelling refers to the problem of assigning known labels to the elements of structured information from a source such as an HTML table or an RDF dump with unknown semantics. In the recent years it has become progressively more relevant due to the growth of available structured information in the Web of data that need to be labelled in order to integrate it in data systems. The existing approaches for semantic labelling have several drawbacks that make them unappealing if not impossible to use in certain scenarios: not accepting nested structures as input, being unable to label structural elements, not being customisable, requiring groups of instances when labelling, requiring matching instances to named entities in a knowledge base, not detecting numeric data, or not supporting complex features. In this article, we propose TAPON-MT, a framework for machine learning semantic labelling. Our framework does not have the former limitations, which makes it domain-independent and customisable. We have implemented it with a graphical interface that eases the creation and analysis of models, and we offer a web service API for their application. We have also validated it with a subset of the National Science Foundation awards dataset, and our conclusion is that TAPON-MT creates models to label information that are effective and efficient in practice.