Exploiting ASP for Semantic Information Extraction

The paper describes HıLεX, a new ASP-based system for the extraction of information from unstructured documents. Unlike previous systems, which are mainly syntactic, HıLεX combines both semantic and syntactic knowledge for a powerful information extraction. In particular, the exploitation of background knowledge, stored in a domain ontology, allows to empower significantly the information extraction mechanisms. HıLεX is founded on a new two-dimensional representation of documents, and heavily exploits DLP– an extension of disjunctive logic programming for ontology representation and reasoning which has been recently implemented on top of DLV . The domain ontology is represented in DLP, and the extraction patterns are encoded by DLP reasoning modules, whose execution yields the actual extraction of information from the input document. HıLεX allows to extract information from both HTML and flat text documents.