An unsupervised framework for extracting and normalizing product attributes from multiple web sites.

ABSTRACTWe have developed an unsupervised framework for simultaneously extracting and normalizing attributes of products from multiple Web pages originated from different sites. Our framework is designed based on a probabilistic graphical model that can model the page-independent content information and the page-dependent layout information of the text fragments in Web pages. One characteristic of our framework is that previously unseen attributes can be discovered from the clue contained in the layout format of the text fragments. Our framework tackles both extraction and normalization tasks by jointly considering the relationship between the content and layout information. Dirichlet process prior is employed leading to another advantage that the number of discovered product attributes is unlimited. An unsupervised inference algorithm based on variational method is presented. The semantics of the normalized attributes can be visualized by examining the term weights in the model. Our framework can be applied to a wide range of Web mining applications such as product matching and retrieval. We have conducted extensive experiments from four different domains consisting of over 300 Web pages from over 150 different Web sites, demonstrating the robustness and effectiveness of our framework.