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Freydenberger-Holldack2018_Article_DocumentSpannersFromExpressive.pdf (1.03 MB)

Document spanners: from expressive power to decision problems

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journal contribution
posted on 2017-04-21, 12:38 authored by Dominik FreydenbergerDominik Freydenberger, Mario Holldack
We examine document spanners, a formal framework for information extraction that was introduced by Fagin, Kimelfeld, Reiss, and Vansummeren (PODS 2013, JACM 2015). A document spanner is a function that maps an input string to a relation over spans (intervals of positions of the string). We focus on document spanners that are defined by regex formulas, which are basically regular expressions that map matched subexpressions to corresponding spans, and on core spanners, which extend the former by standard algebraic operators and string equality selection. First, we compare the expressive power of core spanners to three models {namely, patterns, word equations, and a rich and natural subclass of extended regular expressions (regular expressions with a repetition operator). These results are then used to analyze the complexity of query evaluation and various aspects of static analysis of core spanners. Finally, we examine the relative succinctness of different kinds of representations of core spanners and relate this to the simplification of core spanners that are extended with difference operators.

History

School

  • Science

Department

  • Computer Science

Published in

Theory of Computing Systems

Volume

62

Issue

4

Pages

854 - 898

Citation

FREYDENBERGER, D.D. and HOLLDACK, M., 2018. Document spanners: from expressive power to decision problems. Theory of Computing Systems, 62 (4), pp.854–898.

Publisher

Springer Verlag / © The Authors

Version

  • VoR (Version of Record)

Publisher statement

This work is made available according to the conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. Full details of this licence are available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Acceptance date

2017-04-04

Publication date

2017-05-22

Notes

This is an open access article published by Springer and distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

ISSN

1432-4350

eISSN

1433-0490

Language

  • en