Authors:
Joachim Nielandt
;
Robin de Mol
;
Antoon Bronselaer
and
Guy de Tré
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Belgium
Keyword(s):
Wrapper Induction, XPath, Alignment, Data Extraction, DOM.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Artificial Intelligence
;
Computational Intelligence
;
Fuzzy Information Retrieval and Data Mining
;
Fuzzy Systems
;
Information Extraction
;
Interactive and Online Data Mining
;
Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval
;
Knowledge-Based Systems
;
Mining Text and Semi-Structured Data
;
Soft Computing
;
Symbolic Systems
;
Web Mining
Abstract:
Dealing with a huge quantity of semi-structured documents and the extraction of information therefrom is an important topic that is getting a lot of attention. Methods that allow to accurately define where the data can be found are then pivotal in constructing a robust solution, allowing for imperfections and structural changes in the source material. In this paper we investigate a wrapper induction method that revolves around aligning XPath elements (steps), allowing a user to generalise upon training examples he gives to the data extraction system. The alignment is based on a modification of the well known Levenshtein edit distance. When the training example XPaths have been aligned with each other they are subsequently merged into the path that generalises, as precise as possible, the examples, so it can be used to accurately fetch the required data from the given source material.