The pervasive nature of the internet has caused a significant transformation in the field of genealogical research. This has impacted not only how research is conducted, but has also dramatically increased the number of people discovering their family history. Recent market research (Maritz Marketing 2000, Harris Interactive 2009) indicates that general interest in the United States has increased from 45% in 1996, to 60% in 2000, and 87% in 2009. Increased popularity has caused a dramatic need for improvements in algorithms related to extracting, accessing, and processing genealogical data for use in building family trees. This paper presents one approach to algorithmic improvement in the family history domain, where we infer the familial relationships of households found in human transcribed United States census data. By applying advances made in natural language processing, exploiting the sequential nature of the census, and using state of the art machine learning algorithms, we were able to decrease the error by 35% over a hand coded baseline system. The resulting system is immediately applicable to hundreds of millions of other genealogical records where families are represented, but the familial relationships are missing.

A program that makes an existing website look like a database is called a wrapper. Wrapper learning is the problem of learning website wrappers from examples. We present a wrapper-learning system called WL2 that can exploit several different representations of a document. Examples of such different representations include DOM-level and token-level representations, as well as two-dimensional geometric views of the rendered page (for tabular data) and representations of the visual appearance of text asm it will be rendered. Additionally, the learning system is modular, and can be easily adapted to new domains and tasks. The learning system described is part of an "industrial-strength" wrapper management system that is in active use at WhizBang Labs. Controlled experiments show that the learner has broader coverage and a faster learning rate than earlier wrapper-learning systems.