Building a generic debugger for information extraction pipelines

Abstract

Complex information extraction (IE) pipelines are becoming an integral component of most text processing frameworks. We introduce a first system to help IE users analyze extraction pipeline semantics and operator transformations interactively while debugging. This allows the effort to be proportional to the need, and to focus on the portions of the pipeline under the greatest suspicion. We present a generic debugger for running post-execution analysis of any IE pipeline consisting of arbitrary types of operators. For this, we propose an effective provenance model for IE pipelines which captures a variety of operator types, ranging from those for which full to no specifications are available. We have evaluated our proposed algorithms and provenance model on large-scale real-world extraction pipelines.