Track: Identifying Structure in Web Pages
Paper Title:
Towards Domain-Independent Information Extraction from Web Tables
Authors:
Abstract:
Traditionally, information extraction from web tables has
focused on small, more or less homogeneous corpora, often
based on assumptions about the use of table tags.
A multitude of different
HTML implementations of web tables make these approaches difficult
to scale. In this paper, we approach the problem of
domain-independent information extraction from web tables by
shifting our attention from the tree-based representation of web
pages to a variation of the two-dimensional visual box model used by
web browsers to display the information on the screen. The thereby
obtained topological and style information allows us to fill the gap
created by missing domain-specific knowledge about content and table
templates. We believe that, in a future step, this approach can
become the basis for a new way of large-scale knowledge acquisition
from the current "Visual Web."
