Understanding HTML with Large Language Models

Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, Aleksandra Faust


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown exceptional performance on a variety of natural language tasks. Yet, their capabilities for HTML understanding – i.e., parsing the raw HTML of a webpage, with applications to automation of web-based tasks, crawling, and browser-assisted retrieval – have not been fully explored. We contribute HTML understanding models (fine-tuned LLMs) and an in-depth analysis of their capabilities under three tasks: (i) Semantic Classification of HTML elements, (ii) Description Generation for HTML inputs, and (iii) Autonomous Web Navigation of HTML pages. While previous work has developed dedicated architectures and training procedures for HTML understanding, we show that LLMs pretrained on standard natural language corpora transfer remarkably well to HTML understanding tasks. For instance, when fine-tuned on data from the MiniWoB benchmark, LLMs successfully complete 50% more tasks using 192x less data compared to the previous best supervised model. We create and open-source a large-scale HTML dataset distilled and auto-labeled from CommonCrawl
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.185
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2803–2821
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.185
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.185
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Izzeddin Gur, Ofir Nachum, Yingjie Miao, Mustafa Safdari, Austin Huang, Aakanksha Chowdhery, Sharan Narang, Noah Fiedel, and Aleksandra Faust. 2023. Understanding HTML with Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 2803–2821, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Understanding HTML with Large Language Models (Gur et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.185.pdf