PLAtE: A Large-scale Dataset for List Page Web Extraction
This provides a challenging new benchmark for researchers in web extraction, though it is incremental as it focuses on a specific domain (shopping data).
The authors tackled the lack of large datasets for training neural models in web extraction by introducing PLAtE, a benchmark dataset with 52,898 items from 6,694 pages and 156,014 attributes for product-list segmentation and attribute extraction tasks.
Recently, neural models have been leveraged to significantly improve the performance of information extraction from semi-structured websites. However, a barrier for continued progress is the small number of datasets large enough to train these models. In this work, we introduce the PLAtE (Pages of Lists Attribute Extraction) benchmark dataset as a challenging new web extraction task. PLAtE focuses on shopping data, specifically extractions from product review pages with multiple items encompassing the tasks of: (1) finding product-list segmentation boundaries and (2) extracting attributes for each product. PLAtE is composed of 52, 898 items collected from 6, 694 pages and 156, 014 attributes, making it the first largescale list page web extraction dataset. We use a multi-stage approach to collect and annotate the dataset and adapt three state-of-the-art web extraction models to the two tasks comparing their strengths and weaknesses both quantitatively and qualitatively.