Abstract
Besides the main content, webpages often contain other complementary and noisy data such as advertisements, navigational information, copyright notices, and other template-related elements. The detection and extraction of main content can have many applications, such as web summarization, indexing, data mining, content adaptation to mobile devices, web content printing, etc. We introduce a novel site-level technique for content extraction based on the DOM representation of webpages. This technique analyzes some selected pages in any given website to identify those nodes in the DOM tree that do not belong to the webpage template. Then, an algorithm explores these nodes in order to select the main content nodes. To properly evaluate the technique, we have built a suite of benchmarks by downloading several heterogeneous real websites and manually marking the main content nodes. This suite of benchmarks can be used to evaluate and compare different content extraction techniques.
This work has been partially supported by the EU (FEDER) and the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades/AEI under grant TIN2016-76843-C4-1-R and by the Generalitat Valenciana under grant PROMETEO-II/2015/013 (SmartLogic). Salvador Tamarit was partially supported by the Conselleria de Educación, Investigación, Cultura y Deporte de la Generalitat Valenciana under the grant APOSTD/2016/036.
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Notes
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Bar-Youssef et al. [4] defined a pagelet as a self-contained logical region with a well defined topic of functionality. Accordingly, webpages are composed of pagelets.
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Alarte, J., Insa, D., Silva, J., Tamarit, S. (2018). Main Content Extraction from Heterogeneous Webpages. In: Hacid, H., Cellary, W., Wang, H., Paik, HY., Zhou, R. (eds) Web Information Systems Engineering – WISE 2018. WISE 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11233. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-02922-7_27
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