HTML Tags as Extraction Cues for Web Page Description Construction

Using four previously identified samples of Web pages containing meta-tagged descriptions, the value of meta-tagged keywords, the first 200 characters of the body, and text marked with common HTML tags as extracts helpful for writing summaries was estimated by applying two measures: density of description words and density of two-word description phrases. Generally, titles and keywords showed the highest densities. Parts of the body showed densities not much different from the body as a whole: somewhat higher for the first 200 characters and for text tagged with "center" and "font"; somewhat lower for text tagged with "a"; not significantly different for "table" and "div". Evidence of non-random clumping of description words in the body of some pages nevertheless suggests that further pursuit of automatic passage extraction methods from the body may be worthwhile. Implications of the findings for aids to summarization, and specifically the TexNet32 package, are discussed.