TIE: Topological Information Enhanced Structural Reading Comprehension on Web Pages

Abstract: Recently, the structural reading comprehension (SRC) task on web pages has attracted increasing research interests. Although previous SRC work has leveraged extra information such as HTML tags or XPaths, the informative topology of web pages is not effectively exploited. In this work, we propose a Topological Information Enhanced model (TIE), which transforms the token-level task into a tag-level task by introducing a two-stage process (i.e. node locating and answer refining). Based on that, TIE integrates Graph Attention Network (GAT) and Pre-trained LLM (PLM) to leverage the topological information of both logical structures and spatial structures. Experimental results demonstrate that our model outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performances on the web-based SRC benchmark WebSRC at the time of writing. The code of TIE will be publicly available at https://github.com/X-LANCE/TIE.