{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/150501303","title":"XTreePath: A generalization of XPath to handle real world structural variation","arxiv_id":"1505.01303","date":"2015-05-06","proceeding":null,"authors":["Joseph Paul Cohen","Wei Ding","Abraham Bagherjeiran"],"abstract":"We discuss a key problem in information extraction which deals with wrapper\nfailures due to changing content templates. A good proportion of wrapper\nfailures are due to HTML templates changing to cause wrappers to become\nincompatible after element inclusion or removal in a DOM (Tree representation\nof HTML). We perform a large-scale empirical analyses of the causes of shift\nand mathematically quantify the levels of domain difficulty based on entropy.\nWe propose the XTreePath annotation method to captures contextual node\ninformation from the training DOM. We then utilize this annotation in a\nsupervised manner at test time with our proposed Recursive Tree Matching method\nwhich locates nodes most similar in context recursively using the tree edit\ndistance. The search is based on a heuristic function that takes into account\nthe similarity of a tree compared to the structure that was present in the\ntraining data. We evaluate XTreePath using 117,422 pages from 75 diverse\nwebsites in 8 vertical markets. Our XTreePath method consistently outperforms\nXPath and a current commercial system in terms of successful extractions in a\nblackbox test. We make our code and datasets publicly available online.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1505.01303v3","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1505.01303v3.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"150501303","repo_url":"https://github.com/ieee8023/XTreePath","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}