google-labs-html-chunker 0.0.1

A library to chunk HTML web pages into plain text passages.

HtmlChunker is a library to split web page content into text passages. It uses Beautiful Soup with html5lib to parse HTML into a DOM tree, and then combines text from nodes of the DOM tree into passages.

Each passage contains either a single html node of text, or the text of the node and its siblings and descendants if the total number of words is less than a configurable maximum. The algorithm starts at the leaf nodes and attempts to aggregate node texts until the maximum number of words is reached.

Usage

from google_labs_html_chunker.html_chunker import HtmlChunker

html = "<p>Paragraph 1.</p>"
chunker = HtmlChunker(
    max_words_per_aggregate_passage=200,
    greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes=True,
)
passages = chunker.chunk(html)

Configurations

max_words_per_aggregate_passage: Maximum number of words in a passage comprised of multiple html nodes. A passage with text from only a single html node may exceed this max.

greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes: If True, sibling html nodes are greedily aggregated into passages under max_words_per_aggregate_passage words. If False, each sibling node is output as a separate passage if all siblings cannot be combined into a single passage under max_words_per_aggregate_passage words.

If you find your passages are too disjointed (insufficient context in a single passage for your application), consider increasing max_words_per_aggregate_passage and/or setting greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes to True.

Example Outputs

For all examples, we will use the following input:

html = """
    <div>
        <h1>Heading</h1>
        <p>Text before <a>link</a> and after.</p>
    </div>
"""

Parsed DOM tree:

div
├── h1
│   └── "Heading"
└── p
    ├── "Text before"
    ├── a
    │   └── "link"
    └── "and after."

Example 1

chunker = HtmlChunker(
    max_words_per_aggregate_passage=4,
    greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes=False,
)
passages = chunker.chunk(html)

All html nodes are output separately because there are 5 words in the descendants of the <p> node so they cannot all be combined in <=4 words:

passages: ["Heading", "Text before", "link", "and after."]

Example 2

chunker = HtmlChunker(
    max_words_per_aggregate_passage=5,
    greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes=False,
)
passages = chunker.chunk(html)

The children of the <p> node can now be combined in <= 5 words:

passages: ["Heading", "Text before link and after."]

Example 3

chunker = HtmlChunker(
    max_words_per_aggregate_passage=6,
    greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes=False,
)
passages = chunker.chunk(html)

Text at the next higher level of the tree can now be included since the total number of words is <= 6:

passages: ["Heading Text before link and after."]

Example 4

chunker = HtmlChunker(
    max_words_per_aggregate_passage=4,
    greedily_aggregate_sibling_nodes=True,
)
passages = chunker.chunk(html)

The sibling children of the <p> node are greedily aggregated while the total is <=4 words:

passages: ["Heading", "Text before link", "and after."]