DEXTER: Large-Scale Discovery and Extraction of Product Specifications on the Web

Summary: DEXTER locates product-spec pages with a focused crawler (queries + backlinks) and detects specs via a supervised HTML-fragment classifier. Extraction uses two wrappers: (i) a domain-independent unsupervised wrapper from shared structure, and (ii) a noisy-annotator hybrid; results on 1.46M pages show F≈0.9, precision 0.92, recall 0.95. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 11323
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2015
Pagerank: 5.5165897e-05
Overall Rank: 7,969 | 45.33%
DOI: 10.14778/2831360.2831369

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Disheng Qiu (Roma Tre University)
2. Luciano Barbosa (IBM Research - Brazil)
3. Xin Luna Dong (Google)
4. Yanyan Shen (National University of Singapore)
5. Divesh Srivastava (AT&T)

BibTeX Citation

@article{qiu_vldb15,
        title = {{DEXTER: Large-Scale Discovery and Extraction of Product Specifications on the Web}},
        author = {Qiu, Disheng and Barbosa, Luciano and Dong, Xin Luna and Shen, Yanyan and Srivastava, Divesh},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '15},
        volume = {8},
        number = {13},
        pages = {2194--2205},
        doi = {10.14778/2831360.2831369},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/2831360.2831369},
        year = {2015}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 3 of 3 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,395	Web Record Extraction with Invariants	2023	VLDB	5.2755515e-05
11,911	Big Data Linkage for Product Specification Pages	2018	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05
11,980	Building Structured Databases of Factual Knowledge from Massive Text Corpora	2017	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 14 of 14 cited papers.

Citations counted here include only citations to other VLDB/SIGMOD/CIDR/PODS papers in this database.

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
91	WebTables: Exploring the Power of Tables on the Web	2008	VLDB	0.00034838835
493	Data Integration for the Relational Web	2009	VLDB	0.00017558709
503	RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites	2001	VLDB	0.00017314037
739	Finding Related Tables	2012	SIGMOD	0.0001448231
955	Truth Finding on the Deep Web: Is the Problem Solved?	2013	VLDB	0.00012996675
1,178	Building light-weight wrappers for legacy Web data-sources using W4F	1999	VLDB	0.00011806558
1,684	Answering Table Augmentation Queries from Unstructured Lists on the Web [Extended Abstract]	2009	VLDB	0.0001001843
2,096	An Analysis of Structured Data on the Web	2012	VLDB	9.1746663e-05
2,322	Extraction and Integration of Partially Overlapping Web Sources	2013	VLDB	8.7526172e-05
3,340	Automatic Wrappers for Large Scale Web Extraction	2011	VLDB	7.5040045e-05
3,505	Context-Aware Wrapping: Synchronized Data Extraction	2007	VLDB	7.3582812e-05
3,944	Robust Web Extraction: An Approach Based on a Probabilistic Tree-Edit Model	2009	SIGMOD	7.0058157e-05
5,745	DIADEM: Thousands of Websites to a Single Database	2014	VLDB	6.1018855e-05
7,013	Synthesizing Products for Online Catalogs	2011	VLDB	5.7262474e-05

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