Instructor: Craig Knoblock and Kristina Lerman
Meeting Time: Monday and Wednesday 3.30 - 4:50pm
Location: ZHS 352
Office Hours:
    Monday and Wednesday 4.50pm (immediately after class in the lobby of ZHS)
    Or by appointment (ISI 922 or by phone)
Teaching Assistant:

•  Aman Goel

This course will focus on the basic foundations and techniques in Information Extraction and Integration. There has been a great deal of interest and research over the last few years on this topic and the course will cover the research and tools for addressing the technical problems. The topics covered will include structured data querying (Xquery), view integration techniques, machine learning techniques for turning web sites into structured data sources, high-performance query execution systems based on streaming dataflow, constraint-based integration systems, and approaches to resolving naming inconsistencies across sites. We will also cover the applications of information integration to geospatial data integration.

The class will be run as a lecture course with lots student participation and hands-on experience. As an integral part of the course each student will develop and build an integrated Web application using the research and tools covered in the class.

Course Syllabus and Schedule

• Lecture 1 (January 11)
• Topic: Introduction
• Introduction
• Overview of the course
• Course project
• Required Readings
• What is XQuery ?
  Per Bothner.
• XQuery: A Guided Tour
  Chapter 1 of XQuery from the Experts: A Guide to the W3C XML Query Language
  Howard Katz (ed), Addison-Wesley, San Francisco, CA, 2004
• Recommended Readings
• XQuery 1.0: An XML Query Language
• Slides
• Introduction


• Lecture 2 & 3 (January 13 & 20 )
• Topic: Wrapper Learning
• Wrapper Learning, Maintenance and Generation
• Homework
• Assignment 1 Due (January 22 at midnight)
• Assignment 2 Due (January 29 at midnight)
• Required Readings
• A Hierarchical Approach to Wrapper Induction,
  Ion Muslea, Steve Minton, and Craig A. Knoblock.
  In Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents 1999, Seattle, WA, 1999.
• Wrapper maintenance: A machine learning approach,
  Kristina Lerman, Steven Minton, and Craig A. Knoblock
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, 2003
• RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites
  W. Crescenzi, G. Mecca, P. Merialdo
  The VLDB Journal, 109-118, 2001
• Overview of AutoFeed: An Unsupervised Learning System for Generating Webfeeds
  B. Cenk Gazen and Steven Minton
  Proceedings of AAAI, 2006
• Recommended Readings:
• Hierarchical Wrapper Induction for Semistructured Information Sources,
  I. Muslea, S. Minton, C. Knoblock
  Journal of Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems, 4:93-114, 2001.
• Active Learning with Multiple Views,
  Ion Muslea,
  Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research 27, pp. 202-233
• Wrapper Maintenance
  K. Lerman and C. Knoblock
  Encyclopedia of Database Systems, 2009
• Automatic information extraction from large websites
  Crescenzi, V. and Mecca, G.
  J. ACM 51, 5 (Sep. 2004), 731-779. (Longer version of the RoadRunner paper)
• Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables
  Kristina Lerman, Lise Getoor, Steven Minton and Craig Knoblock
  In Proc. of SIGMOD, 2004, Paris, France.
• Slides
• Wrapper Learning
• Wrapper Generation


• Lecture 4 & 5 (January 25 & 27)
• Topic: Data Integration
• Data Integration
• Data Integration Tools
• Homework
• Assignment 3 Due (February 5 at midnight)
• Required Readings:
• A Scalable Algorithm for Answering Queries Using Views,
  Rachael Pottinger & Alon Halevy
  In Proceedings of VLDB, 2000
• Logic-Based Techniques in Data Integration,
  A. Levy
  in J. Minker (ed.): "Logic-based Artificial Intelligence".
• Recommended Readings:
• Composing, optimizing, and executing plans for bioinformatics web services,
  Snehal Thakkar, Jose Luis Ambite, and Craig A. Knoblock
  VLDB Journal, Special Issue on Data Management, Analysis and Mining for Life Sciences, 14(3):330--353, Sep 2005
• Slides
• Data Integration


• Lecture 6 (February 1)
• Topic: Schema Matching
• Schema Matching
• Homework
• Assignment 4 Due (February 12 at midnight)
• Required Readings:
• iMAP: Discovering Complex Semantic Matches between Database Schemas,
  R. Dhamanka, Y. Lee, A. Doan, A. Halevy, and P. Domingos.
  In Proceedings of SIGMOD-04, 2004.
• A Survey of Approaches to Automatic Schema Matching,
  E. Rahm and P. Bernstein,
  The VLDB Journal 10:334-550, 2001.
• Recommended Readings:
• Learning source descriptions for data integration,
  AH Doan, P Domingos and A Levy,
  In Proceedings of AAAI-2006, Boston, MA, 2006.
• Slides
• Schema Matching


• Lecture 7 (February 3)
• Topic: Source Modeling
• Source Modeling
• Required Readings:
• Learning semantic descriptions of web information sources
  Mark James Carman and Craig A. Knoblock
  In Proceedings of the Twentieth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI), January 2007
• Automatically constructing semantic web services from online sources
  Jose Luis Ambite, Sirish Darbha, Aman Goel,Craig A. Knoblock, Kristina Lerman, Rahul Parundekar, and Thomas Russ
  In Proceedings of the Proceedings of the 8th International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC 2009), 2009
• Recommended Readings:
• Automatically Labeling the Inputs and Outputs of Web Services
  Kristina Lerman, Anon Plangrasopchok and Craig Knoblock
  In Proceedings of AAAI, 2006, Boston, MA, USA
• Slides
• Source Modeling


• Lecture 8 & 9 (February 8 & 10)
• Topic: Semantic Web
• Semantic Web
• Semantic Web Tools
• Homework
• Assignment 5 Due (February 19 at midnight)
• Required Readings:
• Semantic Web
  By Tim Berners-Lee, James Hendler and Ora Lassila
  Scientific American, May 2001.
• The Semantic Web: A Network of Content for the Digital City
  Aaron Swartz and James Hendler
  In Proc. Second Annual Digital Cities Workshop, 2001.
• The Semantic Web: An Introduction
  Sean B. Palmer, 2001.
• Recommended Readings:
• See the web site http://www.disobey.com/detergent/2002/sw123/ for a great list of suggested readings on the semantic web.
• Slides
• Semantic Web


• Lecture 10 (February 17)
• Topic: Mashups
• Building Mashups
• Mapping/Modeling Tools
• Required Readings:
• Making Mashups with Marmite: Towards End-User Programming for the Web.
• Intel Mashmaker http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1247480.1247626.
• Rattapoom Tuchinda, Pedro Szekely, and Craig A. Knoblock, Building Mashups by Example, In Proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent User Interface 2008, tuchinda08-iui.pdf.
• Video Demonstrations:
• http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~jasonh/projects/marmite/Marmite-Screencast.mov
• Intel Mashmaker http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/1505.htm
• Slides
• Building Mashups


• Lecture 11 & 12 (February 22 & 24)
• Topic: Information Extraction
• Information Extraction Systems
• IE Tools
• Homework
• Assignment 5 Due (March 5 at midnight)
• Required Reading (Lecture 11):
• Information Extraction: Distilling Structured Data from Unstructured Text,
  Andrew McCallum.
  ACM Queue, volume 3, Number 9, November 2005.
Semantic annotation of unstructured and ungrammatical text,
Matthew Michelson and Craig A. Knoblock.
In Proceedings of the 19th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2005), Edinburgh, Scotland, 2005.
• Required Reading (Lecture 12):
• Accurate Information Extraction from Research Papers using Conditional Random Fields.
  Fuchun Peng and Andrew McCallum.
  In Proceedings of Human Language Technology Conference and North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (HLT-NAACL), 2004.
• Methods for Domain-Independent Information Extraction from the Web: An Experimental Comparison,
  Oren Etzioni et al.
  In Proceedings of National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2004.
• Optional Reading:
• Conditional Random Fields: An Introduction,
  Hanna M. Wallach,
  Technical Report MS-CIS-04-21. Dept. of Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2004
• Slides
  • Information Extraction
  • Information Extraction II


• Lecture 12 & 13 (March 1 & 3)
• Topics: Record Linkage 
• Record Linkage
• Homework
• Assignment 7 Due (March 12 at midnight)
• Required Readings:
  • Learning Blocking Schemes for Record Linkage,
    Matthew Michelson and Craig A. Knoblock,
    In Proceedings of the 21st National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-2006), Boston, MA, 2006.
  • Adaptive Duplicate Detection Using Learnable String Similarity Measures.
    Mikhail Bilenko and Raymond J. Mooney.
    In Proceedings of the Ninth ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-2003), pp.39-48,Washington, DC, August 2003.
  • EntityBases: Compiling, Organizing and Querying Massive Entity Repositories
    Craig A. Knoblock, José Luis Ambite, Kavita Ganesan, Maria Muslea, Steven Minton, Greg Barish, Evan Gamble, Claude Nanjo, Kane See, Cyrus Shahabi, Ching-Chien Chen
    In Proceedings of International Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 2007
• Optional Readings:
• A Comparison of Fast Blocking Methods for Record Linkage,
  Rohan Baxter, Peter Christen, Tim Churches
  In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-03), 2003
• Efficient clustering of high-dimensional data sets with application to reference matching,
  Andrew McCallum, Kamal Nigam and Lyle H. Ungar,
  In Proceedings of the ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD-00) , 2000
• Slides
• Record Linkage


• Lecture 14 & 15 (March 8 & March 10)
  • Topic: Social Web
  • Social Tagging
  • Social Networks and Privacy
  • Homework
  • Assignment 8 Due (March 19 at midnight)
  • Required Readings (Lecture 14):
    • The Structure of Collaborative Tagging Systems,
      Golder, S. and Huberman, B. ,2005
    • Exploiting Social Annotation for Automatic Resource Discovery
      Plangprasopchok, A. and Lerman, K
      In Proc. of AAAI Workshop on Information Integration on the Web, 2007.
  • Recommended Readings (Lecture 14):
  • Harvesting Social Knowledge from Folksonomies,
    Wu, H., Zubair, M. and Maly, K.
    In Proc. of Conf. on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 2006.
  • Ht06, tagging paper, taxonomy, flickr, academic article, toread.,
    Wu, H., Zubair, M. and Maly, K.
    In Proc. of Conf. on Hypertext and Hypermedia, 2006.
  • Required Readings (Lecture 15):
    • Parametrized Centrality for Network Analysis
      Lerman, K and Ghosh, R.
    • To join or not to join : the illusion of privacy in social networks with mixed public and private user profiles
      Zheleva, E. and Getoor, L.
      In Proc. of International World Wide Web Conference, 2009
  • Slides
  • Social Tagging
  
  
• Lecture 16 & 17 (March 22 & March 24)
  • Topic: Sentiment Analysis
  • Sentiment Analysis
  • Folksonomies
  • Required Readings (Lecture 16):
    • Thumbs up? Sentiment Classification using Machine Learning Techniques,
      Bo Pang, Lillian Lee and Shivakuman Vaithyanathan
      In Proceedings of the ACL-02 conference on Empirical methods in natural language processing
    • Thumbs Up or Thumbs Down? Semantic Orientation Applied to Unsupervised Classification of Reviews
      Peter D. Turney
      In ACL '02: Proceedings of the 40th Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Recommended Readings (Lecture 16):
  • Seeing stars: Exploiting class relationships for sentiment categorization with respect to rating scales,
    Bo Pang, and Lillian Lee
    In ACL '05: Proceedings of the 43rd Annual Meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics
  • Required Readings (Lecture 17):
    • Ontologies are us: a unified model of social networks and semantics
      In Selected Papers from the International Semantic Web Conference, International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC2005)
    • Growing a tree in a forest: constructing folksonomies by integrating structured metadata
      Plangprasopchok, A. Lerman, K., and Getoor, L.
      
  • Recommended Readings (Lecture 17):
  • Inducing Ontologies from Flickr Tags
    Schmitz, P.
    In Proc. of WWW Collaborative Web Tagging workshop, 2006
  • Harvesting Geospatial Knowledge from Social Metadata
    Intagorn, S., Plangprasopchok, A. and Lerman, K.
    In Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management
  • Slides
  • Folksonomies
  
  
• Lecture 18 (March 29)
  • Topic: Geocoding
  • Geocoding
  • Required Readings:
    • A Flexible Addressing System for Approximate Geocoding,
      Davis
    • A comparison of address point, parcel and street geocoding techniques
      Paul A. Zandbergen
      
  
  
• Lecture 19 (March 31)
  • Topic: Geospatial Source Discovery
  • Required Readings:
    • Geospatial Search Service
      Prochazka, D., Motycka, A.
      Information Society. Ljubljana, Slovenia, 2008
    • Identifying Maps on the World Wide Web
      Michelson, M.; Goel, A.; and Knoblock, C. A.
      In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on GIScience, 2008
    • A Data Integration Approach to Dynamically Fusing Geospatial Sources
      Thakkar, S.
      Ph.D. Thesis, Department of Computer Science, University of Southern California, 2007
  
  
• Lecture 20 (April 5)
  • Topic: Geospatial Data Fusion
  • Required Readings:
    • Automatically conflating road vector data with orthoimagery
      Ching-Chien Chen, Craig A. Knoblock, and Cyrus Shahabi
      Geoinformatica, 10(4):495--530, December 2006
    • Automatically and Accurately Conflating Raster Maps with Orthoimagery
      Chen, C.; Knoblock, C. A.; and Shahabi, C.
      Geoinformatica, 12(3):377--410, 2008
  • Slides
  • Geospatial Data Fusion
  
  
• Lecture 21 (April 7)
  • Topic: Geotagging
  • Required Readings:
    • STEWARD: Architecture of a spatio-textual search engine
      M. D. Lieberman, H. Samet, J. Sankaranarayanan, and J. Sperling
      In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Symposium on Geographic Information Systems (ACM GIS'07), pages 186-193, Seattle, WA, November 2007
    • Web-a-where: Geotagging Web Content
      Amitay E., Har'El N., Sivan R., Soffer A.
      ACM SIGIR, 2004
  
  
• Lecture 22 (April 12)
  • Topic: Map Processing
  • Required Readings:
    • Accurate and Automatic Extraction of Road Intersections From Raster Maps
      Y.-Y. Chiang, C. A. Knoblock, C. Shahabi, and C.-C. Chen
      Geoinformatica 13, 2 (2008), 121-157
    • Integrated text and line-art extraction from a topographic map
      L. Li, G. Nagy, A. Samal, S. C. Seth, and Y. Xu.
      International Journal of Document Analysis and Recognition, 2(4):177-185, 2000
  • Slides
  • Map Processing
  
  
• Lecture 23 (April 14)
• Topic: Intellectual Property
• Intellectual Property and Web
• Required Readings:
• Scrape It, Scrub It and Show It: The Battle Over Data Aggregation
• Intellectual Property Law, Freedom of Expression, and the Web Aggregation
  K. McLeod
• Slides
• Intellectual Property and Web


• Lecture 24 (April 28)
• Topic: Geospatial Reasoning
• Required Readings:
• A Constraint Satisfaction Approach to Geospatial Reasoning
  Michalowski, M., and Knoblock, C. A.
  In Proceedings of the Twentieth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05)
• Exploiting Automatically Inferred Constraint Models for Building Identification in Satellite Imagery
  Michalowski, M.; Knoblock, C. A.; Bayer, K. M.; and Choueiry, B. Y.
  
• In Proceedings of the 15th ACM International Symposium on Advances in Geographic Information Systems (ACMGIS 07), 35-42
• Recommended Readings:
• Reformulating CSPs for Scalability with Application to Geospatial Reasoning
  Bayer, K. M.; Michalowski, M.; Choueiry, B. Y.; and Knoblock, C. A.
  
• In International Conference on Principles and Practice of Constraint Programming (CP 07), 164-179
• Slides
• Geospatial Reasoning


• Project Presentations 1 (April 19)


• Project Presentations 2 (April 21)



• Final Exam (Thursday, May 7, 2-4pm)
• Location: ZHS 352