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

Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks

The problem of session-based recommendation aims to predict user actions based on anonymous sessions. Previous methods model a session as a sequence and estimate user representations besides item representations to make recommendations. Though achieved promising results, they are insufficient to obtain accurate user vectors in sessions and neglect complex transitions of items. To obtain accurate item embedding and take complex transitions of items into account, we propose a novel method, i.e. Session-based Recommendation with Graph Neural Networks, SR-GNN for brevity. In the proposed method, session sequences are modeled as graph-structured data. Based on the session graph, GNN can capture complex transitions of items, which are difficult to be revealed by previous conventional sequential methods. Each session is then represented as the composition of the global preference and the current interest of that session using an attention network. Extensive experiments conducted on two real datasets show that SR-GNN evidently outperforms the state-of-the-art session-based recommendation methods consistently.Comment: 9 pages, 4 figures, accepted by AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-19