Ignoring End-User License Agreements (EULAs) for online services due to their length and complexity is a risk undertaken by the majority of online and mobile service users. This paper presents an Ontology-Based Information Extraction (OBIE) method for EULA term and phrase extraction to facilitate a better understanding by humans. An ontology capturing important terms and relationships has been developed and used to guide the OBIE process. Through a feedback cycle we have improved its domain-specifi c coverage by identifying additional concepts. In the detection and extraction, we focus on three key rights and conditions: permission, prohibition and duty. We present the EULAide system, which comprises a custom information extraction pipeline and a number of custom extraction rules tailored for EULA processing. To evaluate our approach, we created and manually annotated a corpus of 20 well-known licenses. For the gold standard we achieved an Inter-Annotator Agreement (IAA) of 90%, resulting in 193 permissions, 185 prohibitions and 168 duties. An evaluation of the OBIE pipeline against this gold standard resulted in an F-measure of 70-74% which, in the context of the IAA, proves the feasibility of the approach.
I carried out my bachelor education in one of the best technical universities of Iran, Amirkabir University of Technology. In my bachelors, I put majority of my efforts in the theoretical computer science and programming-related courses, in which I was always interested. During my master studies I focused on Artificial Intelligence and speech and natural language processing related courses and researches. I took all of my elective courses in these fields and did a number of researches. The largest practical project was my M.Sc. thesis titled “Transliteration of English-Persian Names and Vice Versa Based on Statistical Methods”, for which we proposed new algorithm for aligning name pairs. I succeeded to publish two international papers and one paper in national conference based on my master thesis. After 4 years working experience as a J2EE developer and project manager in a big company in Tehran, I decided to continue my education and pursue PhD in my field of interest. I was granted a DAAD scholarship (German Academic Exchange Service) for further study and training in Germany. From October 2015, I have been a member of Enterprise Information System (EIS) group in Bonn University. My research interests are semantic web, text mining and analysis, information extraction & retrieval and Natural language processing.
