Automatically filling form-based web interfaces with free text inputs

ABSTRACT

On the web of today the most prevalent solution for users to interact with data-intensive applications is the use of form-based interfaces composed by several data input fields, such as text boxes, radio buttons, pull-down lists, check boxes, etc. Although these interfaces are popular and effective, in many cases, free text interfaces are preferred over form-based ones. In this paper we discuss the proposal and the implementation of a novel IR-based method for using data rich free text to interact with form-based interfaces. Our solution takes a free text as input, extracts implicitly data values from it and fills appropriate fields using them. For this task, we rely on values of previous submissions for each field, which are freely obtained from the usage of form-based interfaces

REFERENCES

• 1: Mary Elaine Califf , Raymond J. Mooney, Relational learning of pattern-match rules for information extraction, Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence and the eleventh Innovative applications of artificial intelligence conference innovative applications of artificial intelligence, p.328-334, July 18-22, 1999, Orlando, Florida, United States
• 2: John D. Lafferty , Andrew McCallum , Fernando C. N. Pereira, Conditional Random Fields: Probabilistic Models for Segmenting and Labeling Sequence Data, Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Conference on Machine Learning, p.282-289, June 28-July 01, 2001

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.0 GENERAL

General Terms:
Algorithms, Management

Keywords:
data extraction, form filling, web applications