STAPI: An Automatic Scraper for Extracting Iterative Title-Text Structure from Web Documents

Nan Zhang, Shomir Wilson, Prasenjit Mitra


Abstract
Formal documents often are organized into sections of text, each with a title, and extracting this structure remains an under-explored aspect of natural language processing. This iterative title-text structure is valuable data for building models for headline generation and section title generation, but there is no corpus that contains web documents annotated with titles and prose texts. Therefore, we propose the first title-text dataset on web documents that incorporates a wide variety of domains to facilitate downstream training. We also introduce STAPI (Section Title And Prose text Identifier), a two-step system for labeling section titles and prose text in HTML documents. To filter out unrelated content like document footers, its first step involves a filter that reads HTML documents and proposes a set of textual candidates. In the second step, a typographic classifier takes the candidates from the filter and categorizes each one into one of the three pre-defined classes (title, prose text, and miscellany). We show that STAPI significantly outperforms two baseline models in terms of title-text identification. We release our dataset along with a web application to facilitate supervised and semi-supervised training in this domain.
Anthology ID:
2022.lrec-1.371
Volume:
Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
June
Year:
2022
Address:
Marseille, France
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
European Language Resources Association
Note:
Pages:
3461–3470
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.lrec-1.371
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nan Zhang, Shomir Wilson, and Prasenjit Mitra. 2022. STAPI: An Automatic Scraper for Extracting Iterative Title-Text Structure from Web Documents. In Proceedings of the Thirteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, pages 3461–3470, Marseille, France. European Language Resources Association.
Cite (Informal):
STAPI: An Automatic Scraper for Extracting Iterative Title-Text Structure from Web Documents (Zhang et al., LREC 2022)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/auto-file-uploads/2022.lrec-1.371.pdf