Title
TOMATE: A heuristic-based approach to extract data from HTML tables
Abstract
Extracting data from user-friendly HTML tables is difficult because of their different layouts, formats, and encoding problems. In this article, we present a new proposal that first applies several pre-processing heuristics to clean the tables, then performs functional analysis, and finally applies some post-processing heuristics to produce the output. Our most important contribution is regarding functional analysis, which we address by projecting the cells onto a high-dimensional feature space in which a standard clustering technique is used to make the meta-data cells apart from the data cells. We experimented with two large repositories of real-world HTML tables and our results confirm that our proposal can extract data from them with an F1 score of 89.50% in just 0.09 CPU seconds per table. We confronted our proposal with several competitors and the statistical analysis confirmed its superiority in terms of effectiveness, while it keeps very competitive in terms of efficiency.
Year
DOI
Venue
2021
10.1016/j.ins.2021.04.087
Information Sciences
Keywords
DocType
Volume
HTML tables,Data extraction
Journal
577
ISSN
Citations 
PageRank 
0020-0255
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Juan C. Roldán101.35
Patricia Jiménez200.34
Pedro Szekely300.34
Rafael Corchuelo438949.87