STEM: a suffix tree-based method for web data records extraction

To automatically extract data records from Web pages, the data record extraction algorithm is required to be robust and efficient. However, most of existing algorithms are not robust enough to cope with rich information or noisy data. In this paper, we propose a novel suffix tree-based extraction method (STEM) for this challenging task. First, we extract a sequence of identifiers from the tag paths of Web pages. Then, a suffix tree is built on top of this sequence and four refining filters are proposed to screen out data regions that might not contain data records. To evaluate model performance, we define an evaluation metric called pattern similarity and perform rigorous experiments on five real data sets. The promising experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed STEM is superior to the state-of-the-art algorithms like MDR, TPC and CTVS with respect to precision, recall and pattern similarity. Moreover, the time complexity of STEM is linear to the total number of HTML tags contained in Web pages, which indicates the potential applicability of STEM in a wide range of Web-scale data record extraction applications.