329 research outputs found
Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey
Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of
different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many
approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific
problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily
reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information
Extraction.
This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the
literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple
classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are
grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and
at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction
techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and
Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process
re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow
to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and
disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this
offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large
scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the
possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to
work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System
Wrapper Maintenance: A Machine Learning Approach
The proliferation of online information sources has led to an increased use
of wrappers for extracting data from Web sources. While most of the previous
research has focused on quick and efficient generation of wrappers, the
development of tools for wrapper maintenance has received less attention. This
is an important research problem because Web sources often change in ways that
prevent the wrappers from extracting data correctly. We present an efficient
algorithm that learns structural information about data from positive examples
alone. We describe how this information can be used for two wrapper maintenance
applications: wrapper verification and reinduction. The wrapper verification
system detects when a wrapper is not extracting correct data, usually because
the Web source has changed its format. The reinduction algorithm automatically
recovers from changes in the Web source by identifying data on Web pages so
that a new wrapper may be generated for this source. To validate our approach,
we monitored 27 wrappers over a period of a year. The verification algorithm
correctly discovered 35 of the 37 wrapper changes, and made 16 mistakes,
resulting in precision of 0.73 and recall of 0.95. We validated the reinduction
algorithm on ten Web sources. We were able to successfully reinduce the
wrappers, obtaining precision and recall values of 0.90 and 0.80 on the data
extraction task
Self-supervised automated wrapper generation for weblog data extraction
Data extraction from the web is notoriously hard. Of the types of resources available on the web, weblogs are becoming increasingly important due to the continued growth of the blogosphere, but remain poorly explored. Past approaches to data extraction from weblogs have often involved manual intervention and suffer from low scalability. This paper proposes a fully automated information extraction methodology based on the use of web feeds and processing of HTML. The approach includes a model for generating a wrapper that exploits web feeds for deriving a set of extraction rules automatically. Instead of performing a pairwise comparison between posts, the model matches the values of the web feeds against their corresponding HTML elements retrieved from multiple weblog posts. It adopts a probabilistic approach for deriving a set of rules and automating the process of wrapper generation. An evaluation of the model is conducted on a dataset of 2,393 posts and the results (92% accuracy) show that the proposed technique enables robust extraction of weblog properties and can be applied across the blogosphere for applications such as improved information retrieval and more robust web preservation initiatives
Web Content Extraction - a Meta-Analysis of its Past and Thoughts on its Future
In this paper, we present a meta-analysis of several Web content extraction
algorithms, and make recommendations for the future of content extraction on
the Web. First, we find that nearly all Web content extractors do not consider
a very large, and growing, portion of modern Web pages. Second, it is well
understood that wrapper induction extractors tend to break as the Web changes;
heuristic/feature engineering extractors were thought to be immune to a Web
site's evolution, but we find that this is not the case: heuristic content
extractor performance also tends to degrade over time due to the evolution of
Web site forms and practices. We conclude with recommendations for future work
that address these and other findings.Comment: Accepted for publication in SIGKDD Exploration
Sample-based XPath Ranking for Web Information Extraction
Web information extraction typically relies on a wrapper, i.e., program code or a configuration that specifies how to extract some information from web pages at a specific website. Manually creating and maintaining wrappers is a cumbersome and error-prone task. It may even be prohibitive as some applications require information extraction from previously unseen websites. This paper approaches the problem of automatic on-the-fly wrapper creation for websites that provide attribute data for objects in a ‘search – search result page – detail page’ setup. The approach is a wrapper induction approach which uses a small and easily obtainable set of sample data for ranking XPaths on their suitability for extracting the wanted attribute data. Experiments show that the automatically generated top-ranked XPaths indeed extract the wanted data. Moreover, it appears that 20 to 25 input samples suffice for finding a suitable XPath for an attribute
Web Data Extraction from Template Pages
No Abstrac
A novel alignment algorithm for effective web data extraction from singleton-item pages
Automatic data extraction from template pages is an essential task for data integration and data analysis. Most researches focus on data extraction from list pages. The problem of data alignment for singleton item pages (singleton pages for short), which contain detail information of a single item is less addressed and is more challenging because the number of data attributes to be aligned is much larger than list pages. In this paper, we propose a novel alignment algorithm working on leaf nodes from the DOM trees of input pages for singleton pages data extraction. The idea is to detect mandatory templates via the longest increasing sequence from the landmark equivalence class leaf nodes and recursively apply the same procedure to each segment divided by mandatory templates. By this divide-and-conquer approach, we are able to efficiently conduct local alignment for each segment, while effectively handle multi-order attribute-value pairs with a two-pass procedure. The results show that the proposed approach (called Divide-and-Conquer Alignment, DCA) outperforms TEX (Sleiman and Corchuelo 2013) and WEIR (Bronzi et al. VLDB 6(10):805�816 2013) 2% and 12% on selected items of TEX and WEIR dataset respectively. The improvement is more obvious in terms of full schema evaluation, with 0.95 (DCA) versus 0.63 (TEX) F-measure, on 26 websites from TEX and EXALG (Arasu and Molina 2003)
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