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Adding Missing Words to Regular Expressions

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Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (PAKDD 2018)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 10938))

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Abstract

Regular expressions (regexes) are patterns that are used in many applications to extract words or tokens from text. However, even hand-crafted regexes may fail to match all the intended words. In this paper, we propose a novel way to generalize a given regex so that it matches also a set of missing (previously non-matched) words. Our method finds an approximate match between the missing words and the regex, and adds disjunctions for the unmatched parts appropriately. We show that this method can not just improve the precision and recall of the regex, but also generate much shorter regexes than baselines and competitors on various datasets.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    http://dbgroup.eecs.umich.edu/regexLearning/.

  2. 2.

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~einat/datasets.html.

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Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by Labex DigiCosme (project ANR-11-LABEX-0045-DIGICOSME) operated by ANR as part of the program “Investissement d’Avenir” Idex Paris-Saclay (ANR-11-IDEX-0003-02).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Télécom ParisTech, Paris, France

    Thomas Rebele & Fabian M. Suchanek

  2. ETIS lab/ENSEA/Cergy-Pontoise University/CNRS, Cergy-Pontoise, France

    Katerina Tzompanaki

Authors
  1. Thomas Rebele
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  2. Katerina Tzompanaki
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  3. Fabian M. Suchanek
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Thomas Rebele .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Deakin University, Geelong, Victoria, Australia

    Dinh Phung

  2. National Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu City, Taiwan

    Vincent S. Tseng

  3. Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia

    Geoffrey I. Webb

  4. Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Nomi, Ishikawa, Japan

    Bao Ho

  5. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Mohadeseh Ganji

  6. University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Lida Rashidi

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Rebele, T., Tzompanaki, K., Suchanek, F.M. (2018). Adding Missing Words to Regular Expressions. In: Phung, D., Tseng, V., Webb, G., Ho, B., Ganji, M., Rashidi, L. (eds) Advances in Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. PAKDD 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10938. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93037-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93037-4_6

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-93036-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-93037-4

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