The Smallest Extraction Problem

Summary: Introduces landmark grammars, a CFG family for templated HTML that reduces ambiguity in Web data extraction. Defines SEP to learn a grammar from related pages, with an unsupervised induction algorithm and an automatic extraction system showing improved performance. (summarized by gpt-5-nano on Feb 09 2026)

Paper ID: 12608
Venue: VLDB
Year: 2021
Pagerank: 5.5393291e-05
Overall Rank: 7,811 | 46.42%
DOI: 10.14778/3476249.3476293

Incoming Non-self Citations Over Time

Authors

1. Valerio Cetorelli (Roma Tre University)
2. Paolo Atzeni (Roma Tre University)
3. Valter Crescenzi (Roma Tre University)
4. Franco Milicchio (Roma Tre University)

BibTeX Citation

@article{cetorelli_vldb21,
        title = {{The Smallest Extraction Problem}},
        author = {Cetorelli, Valerio and Atzeni, Paolo and Crescenzi, Valter and Milicchio, Franco},
        journal = {PVLDB},
        series = {{VLDB} '21},
        volume = {14},
        number = {11},
        pages = {2445--2458},
        doi = {10.14778/3476249.3476293},
        url = {https://doi.org/10.14778/3476249.3476293},
        year = {2021}
}

Incoming Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 2 of 2 citing papers.

Rank	Citing Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
9,395	Web Record Extraction with Invariants	2023	VLDB	5.2755515e-05
10,414	Visual Template Inference for Data Extraction from Documents	2026	SIGMOD	5.093636e-05

Outgoing Citations (Sorted by Pagerank)

Showing 13 of 13 cited papers.

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

Rank	Cited Paper	Year	Venue	Pagerank
503	RoadRunner: Towards Automatic Data Extraction from Large Web Sites	2001	VLDB	0.00017314037
588	Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages	2003	SIGMOD	0.00016092668
812	NoDoSE - A Tool for Semi-Automatically Extracting Structured and Semistructured Data from Text Documents.	1998	SIGMOD	0.00013851743
1,131	The Lixto Data Extraction Project - Back and Forth between Theory and Practice	2004	PODS	0.00012044716
2,322	Extraction and Integration of Partially Overlapping Web Sources	2013	VLDB	8.7526172e-05
3,944	Robust Web Extraction: An Approach Based on a Probabilistic Tree-Edit Model	2009	SIGMOD	7.0058157e-05
5,585	Documentum ECI Self-Repairing Wrappers: Performance Analysis	2006	SIGMOD	6.1599116e-05
5,745	DIADEM: Thousands of Websites to a Single Database	2014	VLDB	6.1018855e-05
5,915	WADaR: Joint Wrapper and Data Repair	2015	VLDB	6.0437843e-05
6,320	CERES: Distantly Supervised Relation Extraction from the Semi-Structured Web	2018	VLDB	5.9150411e-05
6,644	Optimal Schemes for Robust Web Extraction	2011	VLDB	5.8150539e-05
6,809	Web Data Extraction using Hybrid Program Synthesis: A Combination of Top-down and Bottom-up Inference	2020	SIGMOD	5.7663737e-05
9,179	Robust and Noise Resistant Wrapper Induction	2016	SIGMOD	5.3066871e-05

Semantically Similar Papers

#	Overall Rank	Paper	Year	Venue
1	1,728	Structured Querying of Web Text: A Technical Challenge	2007	CIDR
2	3,340	Automatic Wrappers for Large Scale Web Extraction	2011	VLDB
3	2,329	Record-Boundary Discovery in Web Documents	1999	SIGMOD
4	2,322	Extraction and Integration of Partially Overlapping Web Sources	2013	VLDB
5	3,944	Robust Web Extraction: An Approach Based on a Probabilistic Tree-Edit Model	2009	SIGMOD
6	2,554	Understanding Web Query Interfaces: Best-Effort Parsing with Hidden Syntax	2004	SIGMOD
7	3,523	Using the Structure of Web Sites for Automatic Segmentation of Tables	2004	SIGMOD
8	588	Extracting Structured Data from Web Pages	2003	SIGMOD
9	11,455	Self-Training for Label-Efficient Information Extraction from Semi-Structured Web-Pages	2023	VLDB
10	7,435	Computational Aspects of Resilient Data Extraction from Semistructured Sources	2000	PODS