RevEx: An Online Consumer Reviews Extraction Tool

This paper presents RevEx, an online consumer reviews extraction tool. RevEx extracts the comments section for products in webshops. In contrast to other web scraping tools, it can work with heterogeneous web pages automatically, that is, it does not need any additional information apart from the web page itself. In addition, RevEx is a page-level tool since it only needs to load the web page whose comments have to be extracted. The technique includes a mechanism to group similar DOM nodes and then, once several sets of similar DOM nodes are obtained, an algorithm selects the group of DOM nodes that corresponds to the comments of the web page. The results of the empirical evaluation show an average F1 higher than 88%, and perfect results for around 75% of web pages.