Tree-Structured Template Generation for Web Pages

As the web becomes an increasingly important source of information, tools for modeling, searching, and extracting information from Web pages are indispensable. By modeling the structure of a Web page defined by its markup tags, one can easily extract target information using structural templates. This paper introduces the Tree Template Automatic Generator (TTAG) that learns tree-structured templates from training Web pages. TTAG was applied to both query-based and frequently updated Web sites, and produced effective templates from a small number of examples. The experiments show that TTAG is a powerful extraction tool for semi-structured information sources.