Combining tag and value similarity for data extraction and alignment

Web databases generate query result pages based on a user's query. Automatically extracting the data from these query result pages is very important for many applications, such as data integration, which need to cooperate with multiple web databases. We present a novel data extraction and alignment method called CTVS that combines both tag and value similarity. CTVS automatically extracts data from query result pages by first identifying and segmenting the query result records (QRRs) in the query result pages and then aligning the segmented QRRs into a table, in which the data values from the same attribute are put into the same column. Specifically, we propose new techniques to handle the case when the QRRs are not contiguous, which may be due to the presence of auxiliary information, such as a comment, recommendation or advertisement, and for handling any nested structure that may exist in the QRRs. We also design a new record alignment algorithm that aligns the attributes in a record, first pairwise and then holistically, by combining the tag and data value similarity information. Experimental results show that CTVS achieves high precision and outperforms existing state-of-the-art data extraction methods. © 2012 IEEE.