Publication detail

Information Extraction from HTML Documents Based on Logical Document Structure

BURGET, R.

Original Title

Information Extraction from HTML Documents Based on Logical Document Structure

Type

dissertation

Language

English

Original Abstract

The World Wide Web presents the largest Internet source of information from a broad range of areas. The web documents are mostly written in the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that doesn't contain any means for semantic description of the content and thus the contained information cannot be processed directly. Current approaches for the information extraction from HTML are mostly based on wrappers that identify the desired data in the document according to some previously specified properties of the HTML code. The wrappers are limited to a narrow set of documents and they are very sensitive to any changes in the document formatting. In this thesis, we propose a novel approach to information extraction that is based on modeling the visual appearance of the document. We show that there exist some general rules for the visual presentation of the data in documents and we define formal models of the visual information contained in a document. Furthermore, we propose the way of modeling the logical structure of an HTML document based on the visual information. Finally, we propose methods for using the logical structure model for the information extraction task based on tree matching algorithms. The advantage of this approach is certain independence on the underlying HTML code and better resistance to changes in the documents.

Keywords

Information Extraction, WWW, HTML, Logical Document Structure, Visual Information, Document Modeling

Authors

BURGET, R.

Released

6. 10. 2004

Publisher

Faculty of Information Technology BUT

Location

Brno

Pages count

85

URL

http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~burgetr/thesis/burget_thesis.pdf, http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~burgetr/thesis/burget_thesis.ps

BibTex

@phdthesis{BUT66727,
  author="Radek {Burget}",
  title="Information Extraction from HTML Documents Based on Logical Document Structure",
  publisher="Faculty of Information Technology BUT",
  address="Brno",
  pages="85",
  year="2004",
  url="http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~burgetr/thesis/burget_thesis.pdf, http://www.fit.vutbr.cz/~burgetr/thesis/burget_thesis.ps"
}