DEADLINER: Building a New Niche Search Engine

Authors: Andries Druger, C. Lee Giles, Frans M. Coetzee, Eric Glover, Gary W. Flake, Steve Lawrence, Christian Omlin

We present DEADLINER, a search engine that catalogs conference and workshop announcements, and ultimately will monitor and extract a wide range of academic convocation material from the web. The system currently extracts speakers, locations, dates, paper submissions (and other) deadlines, topics, program committees, abstracts, and affiliations. A user or user agent can perform detailed searches on these fields. DEADLINER was constructed using a methodology for rapid implementation of specialized search engines. This methodology avoids complex hand-tunded text extraction solutions, or natural language processing, by Bayesian integration of simple extractors that exploit loose formatting and keyword conventions. The Bayesian framework further produces a search engine where each user can control the false alarm rate on a field in an intuitive yet rigorous fashion.