An Index-based Approach for Efficient and Effective Web Content Extraction

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Chen, Yihan, Xu, Benfeng, Wang, Xiaorui, Mao, Zhendong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Chen, Yihan
Xu, Benfeng
Wang, Xiaorui
Mao, Zhendong
author_facet Chen, Yihan
Xu, Benfeng
Wang, Xiaorui
Mao, Zhendong
contents As web agents (e.g., Deep Research) routinely consume massive volumes of web pages to gather and analyze information, LLM context management -- under large token budgets and low signal density -- emerges as a foundational, high-importance, and technically challenging problem for agentic and RAG pipelines. Existing solutions for extracting relevant content are inadequate: generative extraction models suffer from high latency, rule-based heuristics lack adaptability, and chunk-and-rerank methods are blind to webpage structure. To overcome these issues, we introduce Index-based Web Content Extraction to reframe the extraction process from slow, token-by-token generation into a highly efficient, discriminative task of index prediction, achieving both effectiveness and efficiency. We partition HTML into structure-aware, addressable segments, and extract only the positional indices of content relevant to a given query. This method decouples extraction latency from content length, enabling rapid, query-relevant extraction. We first evaluate our method as a post-retrieval processing component within an RAG QA system and find that it improves QA accuracy. Then we directly measure its match rate with the target content in two scenarios: main content extraction (ME) and query-relevant extraction (QE). Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing works in both accuracy and speed, effectively bridging the gap between LLMs and the vast webpages.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06641
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle An Index-based Approach for Efficient and Effective Web Content Extraction
Chen, Yihan
Xu, Benfeng
Wang, Xiaorui
Mao, Zhendong
Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
As web agents (e.g., Deep Research) routinely consume massive volumes of web pages to gather and analyze information, LLM context management -- under large token budgets and low signal density -- emerges as a foundational, high-importance, and technically challenging problem for agentic and RAG pipelines. Existing solutions for extracting relevant content are inadequate: generative extraction models suffer from high latency, rule-based heuristics lack adaptability, and chunk-and-rerank methods are blind to webpage structure. To overcome these issues, we introduce Index-based Web Content Extraction to reframe the extraction process from slow, token-by-token generation into a highly efficient, discriminative task of index prediction, achieving both effectiveness and efficiency. We partition HTML into structure-aware, addressable segments, and extract only the positional indices of content relevant to a given query. This method decouples extraction latency from content length, enabling rapid, query-relevant extraction. We first evaluate our method as a post-retrieval processing component within an RAG QA system and find that it improves QA accuracy. Then we directly measure its match rate with the target content in two scenarios: main content extraction (ME) and query-relevant extraction (QE). Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing works in both accuracy and speed, effectively bridging the gap between LLMs and the vast webpages.
title An Index-based Approach for Efficient and Effective Web Content Extraction
topic Information Retrieval
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06641