7 - Indira Gandhi Centre for Atomic Research

Automatic Extraction of Proper names and Keywords from Web
Resources
Velumani G. and Sivasamy K.
Abstract
One of the major Challenges facing information professionals today relates to
effective mechanisms for retrieval of information from the Web. Traditionally
librarians have used metadata as a tool for management of information resources,
and their effective retrieval. However, given the volume of information on the
Web and the rate at which it keeps growing only mechanisms that can
automatically extract such data will be useful. The existing mechanisms such as
search engines appear to rely on full text and index practically every word
appearing in a text. This leads to the problem of unacceptably low levels of
precision during searches. This research is based on the premise that names of
persons, corporate bodies and keywords present in a text are important in terms
their value as search keys for a document. This paper describes methodologies
that have been developed and are under evaluation fort the automatic
identification and extraction of Names of persons, Names of Corporate bodies
and keywords from web resources. Some of the problems encountered that are
being addressed are also discussed.
1. Introduction:
An issue that has attracted considerable attention in recent years relates to indexing of web
documents in an effective manner so as to facilitate acceptable levels of precision in
retrieval. Much of this research and discussions are based on the assumption that existing
tools for information retrieval from the web are inadequate and suffer from major
limitations. Search Engines and Subject Directories are the major tools currently available
for resource discovery from the Web. The major limitations of search engines in facilitating
effective information retrieval derive largely from the limitations of the mechanisms they
employ for creating their databases. Of course there are differences between various search
engines with regard to what portion of the web document is used to derive index terms.
However, by and large most search engines derive their index terms from web documents
with the help of specially developed programs referred to variously in literature as robots,
spiders, etc. In reality this process of extracting index terms has several major limitations
• It could, and often does, result in extracting several index terms that are not relevant
search keys for the document in question leading to unacceptably low levels of
precision
• The existing mechanisms also do not have any means of distinguishing between
different kinds of terms that may be present in the text being indexed. For example,
there is no way of identifying whether a term that is extracted denotes the name of a
person or is a keyword indicating the subject matter of the web document.
• In this paper we discuss the results of the experiment carried out to identify and
automatically extract
Research Scholor, Dept. Inf. Sci., University of Madras, Chennai.
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