Facilitating document annotation using content and querying value

A large number of organizations today generate and share textual descriptions of their products, services, and actions. Such collections of textual data contain significant amount of structured information, which remains buried in the unstructured text. While information extraction algorithms facilitate the extraction of structured relations, they are often expensive and inaccurate. We present a novel alternative approach that facilitates the generation of the structured metadata by identifying documents that are likely to contain information of interest and this information is going to be subsequently useful for querying the database. Our approach relies on the idea that humans are more likely to add the necessary metadata during creation time, if prompted by the interface; or that it is much easier for humans to identify the metadata when such information actually exists in the document, instead of naively prompting users to fill in forms with information that is not available in the document. We present algorithms that identify structured attributes that are likely to appear within the document, by jointly utilizing the content of the text and the query workload. Our experimental evaluation shows that our approach generates superior results compared to approaches that rely only on content or only on the query workload.