Extraction of Product and Shop Names of Souvenirs from Blog Articles using Conditional Random Fields

Demand for souvenirs that can be purchased only at the particular location or area is increasing, because anyone can purchase various souvenirs on online shopping sites. We call such souvenirs “local limited souvenirs” in this paper. There are no Web sites and services with information about local limited souvenirs. The purpose of this study is to construct a system that presents useful information about local limited souvenirs, in order to provide support for selecting souvenirs. There is information about local limited souvenirs on Question and Answer (Q&A) sites, blog articles and so on. To utilize such information, the system has to extract names of souvenirs from texts in Q&A sites or blog articles automatically. This paper proposes a method for extracting names of souvenirs (products) and shops from blog articles using Conditional Random Fields (CRF), and evaluates the effectiveness of the proposed method by evaluation experiments.