Automatic record extraction for the World Wide Web

As the amount of information on the World Wide Web grows, there is an increasing demand for software that can automatically process and extract information from web pages. Despite the fact that the underlying data on most web pages is structured, we cannot automatically process these web sites/pages as structured data. We need robust technologies that can automatically understand human-readable formatting and induce the underlying data structures. In this thesis, we are focused on solving a specific facet of this general unsupervised web information extraction problem. Structured data can appear in diverse forms from lists to trees to even semi-structured graphs. However, much of the information on the web appears in a flat format we call "records". In this work, we will describe a system, MURIEL, that uses supervised and unsupervised learning techniques to effectively extract records from webpages.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2006

Author dc:creator

• Shen, Yuan Kui

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• David R. Karger.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/35609

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/35609