Who is .com?: Learning to Parse WHOIS Records

WHOIS is a long-established protocol for querying information about the 280M+ registered domain names on the Internet. Unfortunately, while such records are accessible in a ``human-readable'' format, they do not follow any consistent schema and thus are challenging to analyze at scale. Existing approaches, which rely on manual crafting of parsing rules and per-registrar templates, are inherently limited in coverage and fragile to ongoing changes in data representations. In this paper, we develop a statistical model for parsing WHOIS records that learns from labeled examples. Our model is a conditional random field (CRF) with a small number of hidden states, a large number of domain-specific features, and parameters that are estimated by efficient dynamic-programming procedures for probabilistic inference. We show that this approach can achieve extremely high accuracy (well over 99%) using modest amounts of labeled training data, that it is robust to minor changes in schema, and that it can adapt to new schema variants by incorporating just a handful of additional examples. Finally, using our parser, we conduct an exhaustive survey of the registration patterns found in 102M com domains.