Automatic wrapper generation for multilingual web resources

Abstract

We present a wrapper generation system to extract contents of semi-structured documents which contain instances of a record. The generation is done automatically using general assumptions on the structure of instances. It outputs a set of pairs of left and right delimiters surrounding instances of a field. In addition to input documents, our system also receives a set of symbols with which a delimiter must begin or end. Our system treats semi-structured documents just as strings so that it does not depend on markup and natural languages. It does not require any training examples which show where instances are. We show experimental results on both static and dynamic pages which are gathered from 13 Web sites, markuped in HTML or XML, and written in four natural languages. In addition to usual contents, generated wrappers extract useful information hidden in comments or tags which are ignored by other wrapper generation algorithms. Some generated delimiters contain whitespaces or multibyte characters.