Data Driven XPath Generation

The XPath query language offers a standard for information extraction from HTML documents. Therefore, the DOM tree representation is typically used, which models the hierarchical structure of the document. One of the key aspects of HTML is the separation of data and the structure that is used to represent it. A consequence thereof is that data extraction algorithms usually fail to identify data if the structure of a document is changed. In this paper, it is investigated how a set of tabular oriented XPath queries can be adapted in such a way it deals with modifications in the DOM tree of an HTML document. The basic idea is hereby that if data has already been extracted in the past, it could be used to reconstruct XPath queries that retrieve the data from a different DOM tree. Experimental results show the accuracy of our method.