Web page segmentation evaluation
Résumé
In this paper, we present a framework for evaluating segmentation algorithms for Web pages. Web page segmentation consists in dividing a Web page into coherent fragments, called blocks. Each block represents one distinct information element in the page. We define an evaluation model that includes different metrics to evaluate the quality of a segmentation obtained with a given algorithm. Those metrics compute the distance between the obtained segmentation and a manually built segmentation that serves as a ground truth. We apply our framework to four state-of-the-art segmentation algorithms (BOM, Block Fusion, VIPS and JVIPS) on several categories (types) of Web pages. Results show that the tested algorithms usually perform rather well for text extraction, but may have serious problems for the extraction of geometry. They also show that the relative quality of a segmentation algorithm depends on the category of the segmented page.