Record-boundary discovery in Web documents

Extraction of information from unstructured or semistructured Web documents often requires a recognition and delimitation of records. (By "record" we mean a group of information relevant to some entity.) Without first chunking documents that contain multiple records according to record bou...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings of the 1999 ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data 1999-06, Vol.28 (2), p.467-478
Main Authors: Embley, D. W., Jiang, Y., Ng, Y.-K.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Abstraction
Applied computing
Artificial intelligence
Computing methodologies
Document management and text processing
Document preparation
Document representation
Heuristic function construction
Human computer interaction (HCI)
Human-centered computing
Information retrieval
Information systems
Interaction paradigms
Program reasoning
Search methodologies
Semantics and reasoning
Theory of computation
Web applications
Web services
Web-based interaction
World Wide Web
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Summary:Extraction of information from unstructured or semistructured Web documents often requires a recognition and delimitation of records. (By "record" we mean a group of information relevant to some entity.) Without first chunking documents that contain multiple records according to record boundaries, extraction of record information will not likely succeed. In this paper we describe a heuristic approach to discovering record boundaries in Web documents. In our approach, we capture the structure of a document as a tree of nested HTML tags, locate the subtree containing the records of interest, identify candidate separator tags within the subtree using five independent heuristics, and select a consensus separator tag based on a combined heuristic. Our approach is fast (runs linearly for practical cases within the context of the larger data-extraction problem) and accurate (100% in the experiments we conducted).
ISSN:0163-5808
1943-5835
DOI:10.1145/304181.304223