[johndavi]

We exclusively rely on ML for our core product at Diffbot: automatic data extraction from web pages (articles, products, images, discussion threads, more in the pipeline), cross-site data normalization, etc. It's interesting and challenging work, but a definite point of pride for us to be a profitable AI-powered entity.

[infinite8s]

Are you guys familiar with the DeepDive work from Christopher Re's group at Stanford?

[LolWolf]

Or his company Lattice for that matter.

[johndavi]

Yes to both!

[suanmeiguo]

Oh interesting. I've used diffbot and never thought Diffbot relies on AI. Could you elaborate? I thought it's a simple crawling and parsing task but I might be naive on this.

[johndavi]

Here's a slightly more detailed description: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-algorithm-used-by-Diffbot-...

All identification and extraction in our APIs is based on our ML models, which have been fed hundreds of thousands of data-point examples from annotated web pages. Basically: our back end has reviewed millions of web pages to learn what various components of a page are -- and even what "type" of page a page is -- and uses that to make judgments on ones submitted via API.