Extracting laboratory front pages from university websites

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a method for extracting laboratory front pages from university websites. There are more than 779 universities and colleges in Japan. For selecting a university or a college, some high school students want to know what laboratories these universities or colleges have. To learn about these laboratories, high school students have to search the laboratory front pages from the university websites. However, sometimes it is difficult to find a laboratory front page because they are sometimes buried deep in the hierarchy of university websites. Our method extracts laboratory front pages by using a support vector machine model and applying certain rules. We also developed a laboratory search system that can be used to retrieve laboratory front pages extracted with our method. We evaluated our method and confirmed that is attained 85.0% precision and 65.5% recall.