Understanding Tables on the Web

Overview | Understanding Process | Application Snapshot | Experiment

• Given a table, where is the header?

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Pablo Picasso	Oct 25 1881	Spain	Guernica	1937
Henri Matisse	Dec 31 1869	France	Woman with a Hat	1905
Nicolas Poussin	Jun 15 1594	-	Et in Arcadia ego	1630

Evidences for the first row:
1. Can we infer some concepts from it?
concept musician has attributes date of birth, nationality
concept artists has attributes nationality, representative work, creation time
…
2. Any syntactic clues?
representative work and creation time have a colon followed by
all cells under creation time are numbers

Evidences for other positions? Not as much as the first row.
Conclusion: first row is the header of the table.

• Given a table with header, what is it talking about?

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Pablo Picasso	Oct 25 1881	Spain	Guernica	1937
Henri Matisse	Dec 31 1869	France	Woman with a Hat	1905
Nicolas Poussin	Jun 15 1594	-	Et in Arcadia ego	1630

Painters?
known painters in the table: Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse
known attributes of painters in the table: date of birth, nationality
Maybe.

Countries?
known countries in the table: Spain, France
known attributes of countries in the table: none
Not really…

Other concepts?
…

Seems painters is a possible one which is supported by the first column and the header.
Conclusion:
This table shows several painters and their information
(other concepts are also possible. For example, artists, celebrities)
The first column is the Entity Column
(each row describes an entity)

 

• Split it into statements: (the main entity is italic)

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Pablo Picasso	Oct 25 1881	Spain	Guernica	1937

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Henri Matisse	Dec 31 1869	France	Woman with a Hat	1905

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Nicolas Poussin	Jun 15 1594	-	Et in Arcadia ego	1630



And suppose we have another table splitted as below:



Country	Name	Birthday
German	Beethoven	17 December 1770

Country	Name	Birthday
Austria	Mozart	27 January 1756

• The the result for query "artist date of birth" might look like (assume ranked by score):

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Pablo Picasso	Oct 25 1881	Spain	Guernica	1937




Country	Name	Birthday
Austria	Mozart	27 January 1756




Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Henri Matisse	Dec 31 1869	France	Woman with a Hat	1905


...

• Extend Probase:

Artist	Date of Birth	Nationality	Representative Work:	Creation Time:
Pablo Picasso	Oct 25 1881	Spain	Guernica	1937
Henri Matisse	Dec 31 1869	France	Woman with a Hat	1905
Nicolas Poussin	Jun 15 1594	-	Et in Arcadia ego	1630

In Probase, painters has entities Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, but without Nicolas Poussin
∴ Add Nicolas Poussin into painters with some uncertainty

In Probase, artists has attributes nationality, representative work, creation time, but without date of birth
∴ Add date of birth into attributes of artists with some uncertainty