Boilerplate detection using shallow text features

In addition to the actual content Web pages consist of navi-gational elements, templates, and advertisements. This boil-erplate text typically is not related to the main content, may deteriorate search precision and thus needs to be detected properly. In this paper, we analyze a small set of shallow text features for classifying the individual text elements in a Web page. We compare the approach to complex, state-of-the-art techniques and show that competitive accuracy can be achieved, at almost no cost. Moreover, we derive a simple and plausible stochastic model for describing the boilerplate creation process. With the help of our model, we also quantify the impact of boilerplate removal to re-trieval performance and show significant improvements over the baseline. Finally, we extend the principled approach by straight-forward heuristics, achieving a remarkable accuracy.