A Survey on Region Extractors from Web Documents

Abstract

Extracting information from web documents has become a research area in which new proposals sprout out year after year. This has motivated several researchers to work on surveys that attempt to provide an overall picture of the many existing proposals. Unfortunately, none of these surveys provide a complete picture, because they do not take region extractors into account. These tools are kind of preprocessors, because they help information extractors focus on the regions of a web document that contain relevant information. With the increasing complexity of web documents, region extractors are becoming a must to extract information from many websites. Beyond information extraction, region extractors have also found their way into information retrieval, focused web crawling, topic distillation, adaptive content delivery, mashups, and metasearch engines. In this paper, we survey the existing proposals regarding region extractors and compare them side by side.