I am interested in parsing semi-structured text.Assume that I have a text with labels of the kind: year_field, year_value, identity_field, identity_value, ..., address_field, address_value, and so on.These fields and their associated values can be everywhere in the text, but usually they are near to each other, and more generally the text in organized in a (very) rough matrix, but rather often the value is just after the associated field with eventually some non-interesting information in between. The number of different format can be up to several dozens, and is not that rigid (do not count on spacing, moreover some information can be added and removed).I am looking toward machine learning techniques to extract all those (field,value) of interest.I think metric learning and/or conditional random fields (CRF) could be of a great help, but I have not practical experience with them.Does anyone have already encounter a similar problem?Any suggestion or literature on this topic?
metric learning and information retrieval
text mining;information retrieval