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Interactive Wrapper Generation with Minimal User Effort

 

TR-CIS-2005-02 (05/31/2005)
Utku Irmak and Torsten Suel

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Abstract

While much of the data on the Web is unstructured in nature, there is also a significant amount of embedded structured data, such as product information on e-commerce sites or stock data on financial sites. A large amount of research has focused on the problem of generating wrappers, i.e., software tools that allow easy and robust extraction of structured data from text and HTML sources. In many applications, such as comparison shopping, data has to be extracted from many different sources, making manual coding of a wrapper for each source impractical. On the other hand, fully automatic approaches are often not reliable enough, resulting in low quality of the extracted data. We describe a system for semi-automatic wrapper generation that can be trained on various data sources in a simple interactive manner. Our goal is to minimize the user effort for training reliable wrappers, by providing an intuitive training interface that is implemented using an underlying powerful extraction language and training algorithm. We show that our system achieves robust data extraction with significantly less user effort than previous approaches.

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