On the synthesis of metadata tags for HTML files

Abstract

RDFa, JSON-LD, Microdata, and Microformats allow to endow the data in HTML files with metadata tags that help software agents understand them. Unluckily, there are many HTML files that do not have any metadata tags, which has motivated many authors to work on proposals to synthesize them. But they have some problems: the authors either provide an overall picture of their designs without too many details on the techniques behind the scenes or focus on the techniques but do not describe the design of the software systems that support them; many of them cannot deal with data that are encoded using semistructured formats like forms, listings, or tables; and the few proposals that can work on tables can deal with horizontal listings only. In this article, we describe the design of a system that overcomes the previous limitations using a novel embedding approach that has proven to outperform four state-of-the-art techniques on a repository with randomly selected HTML files from 40 differ ent sites. According to our experimental analysis, our proposal can achieve an F1 score that outperforms the others by 10.14%; this difference was confirmed to be statistically significant at the standard confidence level.