Title
Multimodal Web Page Segmentation Using Self-organized Multi-objective Clustering
Abstract
AbstractWeb page segmentation (WPS) aims to break a web page into different segments with coherent intra- and inter-semantics. By evidencing the morpho-dispositional semantics of a web page, WPS has traditionally been used to demarcate informative from non-informative content, but it has also evidenced its key role within the context of non-linear access to web information for visually impaired people. For that purpose, a great deal of ad hoc solutions have been proposed that rely on visual, logical, and/or text cues. However, such methodologies highly depend on manually tuned heuristics and are parameter-dependent. To overcome these drawbacks, principled frameworks have been proposed that provide the theoretical bases to achieve optimal solutions. However, existing methodologies only combine few discriminant features and do not define strategies to automatically select the optimal number of segments. In this article, we present a multi-objective clustering technique called MCS that relies on \( K \)-means, in which (1) visual, logical, and text cues are all combined in a early fusion manner and (2) an evolutionary process automatically discovers the optimal number of clusters (segments) as well as the correct positioning of seeds. As such, our proposal is parameter-free, combines many different modalities, does not depend on manually tuned heuristics, and can be run on any web page without any constraint. An exhaustive evaluation over two different tasks, where (1) the number of segments must be discovered or (2) the number of clusters is fixed with respect to the task at hand, shows that MCS drastically improves over most competitive and up-to-date algorithms for a wide variety of external and internal validation indices. In particular, results clearly evidence the impact of the visual and logical modalities towards segmentation performance.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3480966
ACM Transactions on Information Systems
Keywords
DocType
Volume
Web page segmentation, multimodal early fusion, multi-objective optimization, self-organizing maps, evolutionary computation
Journal
40
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
3
1046-8188
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Srivatsa Ramesh Jayashree100.34
Gaël Dias235441.95
Judith Jeyafreeda Andrew300.34
Sriparna Saha41064106.07
Fabrice Maurel5105.89
Stephane Ferrari600.34