Hybrid approach to extracting information from web-tables

This study concerns the extracting of information from tables in HTML documents. In our previous work, as a prerequisite for information extraction from tables in HTML, algorithms for separating meaningful tables and decorative tables were constructed, because only meaningful tables can be used to extract information and a preponderant proportion of decorative tables in training harms the learning result. In order to extract information, this study separated the head from the body in meaningful tables by extending the head extraction algorithm that was constructed in our previous work, using a machine learning algorithm, C4.5, and set up heuristics for table-schema extraction from meaningful tables by analyzing their head(s). In addition, table information in triples was extracted by determining the relation between the data and the extracted table schema. We obtained 71.2% accuracy in extracting table-schemata and information from the meaningful tables.