Towards Zero-shot Relation Extraction in Web Mining: A Multimodal Approach with Relative XML Path

Abstract: The rapid growth of web pages and the increasing complexity of their structure poses a challenge for web mining models. Web mining models are required to understand the semi-structured web pages, particularly when little is known about the subject or template of a new page. Current methods migrate LLMs to the web mining by embedding the XML source code into the transformer or encoding the rendered layout with graph neural networks. However, these approaches do not take into account the relationships between text nodes within and across pages. In this paper, we propose a new approach, ReXMiner, for zero-shot relation extraction in web mining. ReXMiner encodes the shortest relative paths in the Document Object Model (DOM) tree which is a more accurate and efficient signal for key-value pair extraction within a web page. It also incorporates the popularity of each text node by counting the occurrence of the same text node across different web pages. We use the contrastive learning to address the issue of sparsity in relation extraction. Extensive experiments on public benchmarks show that our method, ReXMiner, outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in the task of zero-shot relation extraction in web mining.