Context: Web page segmentation methods have been used for different purposes such as web page classification and content analysis. These methods categorize a web page into different blocks, where each block contains similar components. Objective: The goal of this paper is to propose a new segmentation approach that semantically segments web pages into integrated blocks and obtains high segmentation accuracy. Method: In this paper, we propose a new segmentation model that semantically segments web pages into integrated blocks, where (1) it merges web page content into basic-blocks by simulating human perception using Gestalt laws of grouping; and, (2) it utilizes semantic text similarity to identify similar blocks and regroup these similar basic-blocks as integrated blocks. Results: To verify the accuracy of our approach, we (1) applied it to three datasets, (2) compared it with the five existing state-of-the-art algorithms. The results show that our approach outperforms all the five comparison methods in terms of precision, recall, F-1 score, and ARI. Conclusion: In this paper, we propose a new segmentation model and apply it to three datasets to (1) generate basic-blocks by simulating human perception to segment a web page, (2) identify semantically related blocks and regroup them as an integrated block, and (3) address limitations found in existing approaches.

Webpage analysis is carried out for various purposes such as webpage segmentation. The goal of webpage segmentation is to divide a page into blocks that have similar elements. A fusion approach that combines different analyses is required in order to obtain high segmentation accuracy. In this paper, we propose a new fusion model for webpage segmentation, where we (1) merge webpage content into basic-blocks by simulating human perception; and, (2) identify similar blocks using semantic text similarity and regroup these similar blocks as fusion blocks. This approach is applied to three public datasets and evaluated by comparing with state-of-the-art algorithms. The results characterize that our proposed approach outperforms other existing webpage segmentation methods, in terms of accuracy.