An Efficient Mechanism for Product Data Extraction from E-Commerce Websites

A large amount of data is present on the web which can be used for useful purposes like a product recommendation,price comparison and demand forecasting for a particular product.Websites are designed for human understanding and not for machines.Therefore,to make data machine-readable,it requires techniques to grab data from web pages.Researchers have addressed the problem using two approaches,i.e.,knowledge engineering and machine learning.State of the art knowledge engineering approaches use the structure of documents,visual cues,clustering of attributes of data records and text processing techniques to identify data records on a web page.Machine learning approaches use annotated pages to learn rules.These rules are used to extract data from unseen web pages.The structure of web documents is continuously evolving.Therefore,new techniques are needed to handle the emerging requirements of web data extraction.In this paper,we have presented a novel,simple and efficient technique to extract data from web pages using visual styles and structure of documents.The proposed technique detects Rich Data Region(RDR)using query and correlative words of the query.RDR is then divided into data records using style similarity.Noisy elements are removed using a Common Tag Sequence(CTS)and formatting entropy.The system is implemented using JAVA and runs on the dataset of real-world working websites.The effectiveness of results is evaluated using precision,recall,and F-measure and compared with five existing systems.A comparison of the proposed technique to existing systems has shown encouraging results.

Implementation of a weblog extraction system with an improved template extraction technique

Purpose: The objectives of this study are to explore an effective technique to extract information from weblogs and develop an experimental system to extract structured information as much as possible with this technique. The system will lay a foundation for evaluation, analysis, retrieval, and utilization of the extracted information.Design/methodology/approach: An improved template extraction technique was proposed.Separate templates designed for extracting blog entry titles, posts and their comments were established, and structured information was extracted online step by step. A dozen of data items, such as the entry titles, posts and their commenters and comments, the numbers of views, and the numbers of citations were extracted from eight major Chinese blog websites,including Sina, Sohu and Bokee.Findings: Results showed that the average accuracy of the experimental extraction system reached 94.6%. Because the online and multi-threading extraction technique was adopted, the speed of extraction was improved with the average speed of 15 pages per second without considering the network delay. In addition, entries posted by Ajax technology can be extracted successfully.Research limitations: As the templates need to be established in advance, this extraction technique can be effectively applied to a limited range of blog websites. In addition, the stability of the extraction templates was affected by the source code of the blog pages.Practical implications: This paper has studied and established a blog page extraction system,which can be used to extract structured data, preserve and update the data, and facilitate the collection, study and utilization of the blog resources, especially academic blog resources.Originality/value: This modified template extraction technique outperforms the Web page downloaders and the specialized blog page downloaders with structured and comprehensive data extraction.

A Framework of Web Data Integrated LBS Middleware

In this paper, we propose a flexible locationbased service （LBS） middleware framework to make the development and deployment of new location based applications much easier. Considering the World Wide Web as a huge data source of location relative information, we integrate the common used web data extraction techniques into the middleware framework, exposing a unified web data interface for the upper applications to make them more attractive. Besides, the framework also emphasizes some common LBS issues, including positioning, location modeling, location-dependent query processing, privacy and secure management.

Creating customized data services from web pages

To extract structured data from a web page with customized requirements,a user labels some DOM elements on the page with attribute names.The common features of the labeled elements are utilized to guide the user through the labeling process to minimize user efforts,and are also utilized to retrieve attribute values.To turn the attribute values into a structured result,the attribute pattern needs to be induced.For this purpose,a space-optimized suffix tree called attribute tree is built to transform the document object model(DOM) tree into a simpler form while preserving its useful properties such as attribute sequence order.The pattern is induced bottom-up on the attribute tree,and is further used to build the structured result.Experiments are conducted and show high performance of our approach in terms of precision,recall and structural correctness.

Intelligent and Adaptive Web Data Extraction System Using Convolutional and Long Short-Term Memory Deep Learning Networks

Data are crucial to the growth of e-commerce in today's world of highly demanding hyper-personalized consumer experiences,which are collected using advanced web scraping technologies.However,core data extraction engines fail because they cannot adapt to the dynamic changes in website content.This study investigates an intelligent and adaptive web data extraction system with convolutional and Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)networks to enable automated web page detection using the You only look once(Yolo)algorithm and Tesseract LSTM to extract product details,which are detected as images from web pages.This state-of-the-art system does not need a core data extraction engine,and thus can adapt to dynamic changes in website layout.Experiments conducted on real-world retail cases demonstrate an image detection(precision)and character extraction accuracy(precision)of 97%and 99%,respectively.In addition,a mean average precision of 74%,with an input dataset of 45 objects or images,is obtained.

2D Correlative-Chain Conditional Random Fields for Semantic Annotation of Web Objects

Semantic annotation of Web objects is a key problem for Web information extraction. The Web contains an abundance of useful semi-structured information about real world objects, and the empirical study shows that strong two-dimensional sequence characteristics and correlative characteristics exist for Web information about objects of the same type across different Web sites. Conditional Random Fields （CRFs） are the state-of-the-art approaches taking the sequence characteristics to do better labeling. However, as the appearance of correlative characteristics between Web object elements, previous CRFs have their limitations for semantic annotation of Web objects and cannot deal with the long distance dependencies between Web object elements efficiently. To better incorporate the long distance dependencies, on one hand, this paper describes long distance dependencies by correlative edges, which are built by making good use of structured information and the characteristics of records from external databases; and on the other hand, this paper presents a two-dimensional Correlative-Chain Conditional Random Fields （2DCC-CRFs） to do semantic annotation of Web objects. This approach extends a classic model, two-dimensional Conditional Random Fields （2DCRFs）, by adding correlative edges. Experimental results using a large number of real-world data collected from diverse domains show that the proposed approach can significantly improve the semantic annotation accuracy of Web objects.