Recovering structure from unstructured web-accessible classified advertisements
Richard J. Cole, Peter Eklund, Mikael Strand · 2000
This paper describes a research prototype system called RFCA for structuring Web-accessible rental classified advertisements based on semantic content. A hand crafted parser is used to extract various facets of the rental property being advertised including amongst others; number of room, type of garage, dwelling type (unit, house, or high rise apartment), price and contact details. The performance of the parser is measured in terms precision and recall by comparing its output to that of human expert. The structured information once extracted is stored in a relational database and users searching for rental properties are presented with a graphical organisation of rental properties according to predefined themes. The overall result is a suite of tools for extracting, cleaning, structuring, and visually querying/browsing collection of web-accessible rental advertisements. The mathematical and methodological foundation for the graphical organisation of the structured information is pro...