Web Information Extraction for Social Good: Food Pantry Answering As an Example

Social determinants of health (SDH) are the conditions in which we are born, live, work, and age. Food insecurity (FI) is an important domain of SDH. FI is associated with poor health outcomes. Food bank/pantry (food pantry) directly addresses FI. Improving the availability and quality of food from food pantries could reduce FI, leading to improved health outcomes. However, it is difficult for a client to access food pantry information. In this study, we built a food pantry answering framework by combining location-aware information retrieval, web information extraction and domain-specific answering. Our proposed framework first retrieves pantry candidates based on geolocation of the client, and utilizes structural information from markup language to extract semantic chunks related to six common client requests. We use BERT and RoBERTa as information extraction models and compare three different web page segmentation methods in the experiments.