Doleschal, Johannes, Kimelfeld, Benny, Martens, Wim, Peterfreund, Liat, University of Bayreuth, Hasselt University (UHasselt), Technion - Israel Institute of Technology [Haifa], Département d'informatique de l'École normale supérieure (DI-ENS), École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS Paris), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Value from Data (VALDA ), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS Paris), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Inria de Paris, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria), This work was supported by the German-Israeli Foundation for Scientific Research and Development (GIF), grant I-1502-407.6/2019. The work of Johannes Doleschal and Wim Martens was also supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), grant MA 4938/4-1. The work of Benny Kimelfeld and Liat Peterfreund was also supported by the Israel Science Foundation (ISF), grants 1295/15 and 768/19, and the DFG project 412400621 (DIP program)., Département d'informatique - ENS Paris (DI-ENS), Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS Paris), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS Paris), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Inria de Paris, École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Université Paris sciences et lettres (PSL)-Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (Inria)-Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS)-École normale supérieure - Paris (ENS-PSL), and Réponse efficace aux requêtes sous mises à jour EQUUS - ANR-19-CE48-0019 AAPG2019 - 2019
The framework of document spanners abstracts the task of information extraction from text as a function that maps every document (a string) into a relation over the document’s spans (intervals identified by their start and end indices). For instance, the regular spanners are the closure under the Relational Algebra (RA) of the regular expressions with capture variables, and the expressive power of the regular spanners is precisely captured by the class of vset-automata - a restricted class of transducers that mark the endpoints of selected spans. In this work, we embark on the investigation of document spanners that can annotate extractions with auxiliary information such as confidence, support, and confidentiality measures. To this end, we adopt the abstraction of provenance semirings by Green et al., where tuples of a relation are annotated with the elements of a commutative semiring, and where the annotation propagates through the (positive) RA operators via the semiring operators. Hence, the proposed spanner extension, referred to as an annotator, maps every string into an annotated relation over the spans. As a specific instantiation, we explore weighted vset-automata that, similarly to weighted automata and transducers, attach semiring elements to transitions. We investigate key aspects of expressiveness, such as the closure under the positive RA, and key aspects of computational complexity, such as the enumeration of annotated answers and their ranked enumeration in the case of numeric semirings. For a number of these problems, fundamental properties of the underlying semiring, such as positivity, are crucial for establishing tractability., LIPIcs, Vol. 155, 23rd International Conference on Database Theory (ICDT 2020), pages 8:1-8:18