Abstract

Many Web sites, especially those that dynamically generate HTML pages to display the results of a user's query, present information in the form of list or tables. Current tools that allow applications to programmatically extract this information rely heavily on user input, often in the form of labeled extracted records. The sheer size and rate of growth of the Web make any solution that relies primarily on user input is infeasible in the long term. Fortunately, many Web sites contain much explicit and implicit structure, both in layout and content, that we can exploit for the purpose of information extraction. This paper describes an approach to automatic extraction and segmentation of records from Web tables. Automatic methods do not require any user input, but rely solely on the layout and content of the Web source. Our approach relies on the common structure of many Web sites, which present information as a list or a table …

Date

June 13, 2004

Authors

Kristina Lerman, Lise Getoor, Steven Minton, Craig Knoblock

Book

Proceedings of the 2004 ACM SIGMOD international conference on Management of data

Pages

119-130