Web-scale information extraction with vertex

Abstract

Vertex is a Wrapper Induction system developed at Yahoo! for extracting structured records from template-based Web pages. To operate at Web scale, Vertex employs a host of novel algorithms for (1) Grouping similar structured pages in a Web site, (2) Picking the appropriate sample pages for wrapper inference, (3) Learning XPath-based extraction rules that are robust to variations in site structure, (4) Detecting site changes by monitoring sample pages, and (5) Optimizing editorial costs by reusing rules, etc. The system is deployed in production and currently extracts more than 250 million records from more than 200 Web sites. To the best of our knowledge, Vertex is the first system to do high-precision information extraction at Web scale.