QuTE: Answering Quantity Queries from Web Tables

Abstract

Quantities are financial, technological, physical and other measures that denote relevant properties of entities, such as revenue of companies, energy efficiency of cars or distance and brightness of stars and galaxies. Queries with filter conditions on quantities are an important building block for downstream analytics, and pose challenges when the content of interest is spread across a huge number of web tables and other ad-hoc datasets. Search engines support quantity lookups, but largely fail on quantity filters. The QuTE system presented in this paper aims to overcome these problems. It comprises methods for automatically extracting entity-quantity facts from web tables, as well as methods for online query processing, with new techniques for query matching and answer ranking.