Regression Testing for Wrapper Maintenance

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Volume

Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 16

Technical Papers

Recent work on Internet information integration assumes a library of wrappers, specialized information extraction procedures. Maintaining wrappers is difficult, because the formatting regularities on which they rely often change. The wrapper verification problem is to determine whether a wrapper is correct. Standard regression testing approaches are inappropriate, because both the formatting regularities and a site’s underlying content may change. We introduce RAPTURE, a fully-implemented, domain-independent verification algorithm. RAPTURE uses well-motivated heuristics to compute the similarity between a wrapper’s expected and observed output. Experiments with 27 actual Internet sites show a substantial performance improvement over standard regression testing.