Over 40% of columns in hundreds of millions of Web tables contain numeric quantities. Tables are a richer source of structured knowledge than free text. We harness Web tables to answer queries whose target is a quantity with natural variation, such as net worth of zuckerburg, battery life of ipad, half life of plutonium, and calories in pizza. Our goal is to respond to such queries with a ranked list of quantity distributions, suitably represented. Apart from the challenges of informal schema and noisy extractions, which have been known since tables were used for non-quantity information extraction, we face additional problems of noisy number formats, as well as unit specifications that are often contextual and ambiguous.
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Sarawagi et al. (2014) studied this question.
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