Summary of the paper

Title BlogBuster: A Tool for Extracting Corpora from the Blogosphere
Authors Georgios Petasis and Dimitrios Petasis
Abstract This paper presents BlogBuster, a tool for extracting a corpus from the blogosphere. The topic of cleaning arbitrary web pages with the goal of extracting a corpus from web data, suitable for linguistic and language technology research and development, has attracted significant research interest recently. Several general purpose approaches for removing boilerplate have been presented in the literature; however the blogosphere poses additional requirements, such as a finer control over the extracted textual segments in order to accurately identify important elements, i.e. individual blog posts, titles, posting dates or comments. BlogBuster tries to provide such additional details along with boilerplate removal, following a rule-based approach. A small set of rules were manually constructed by observing a limited set of blogs from the Blogger and Wordpress hosting platforms. These rules operate on the DOM tree of an HTML page, as constructed by a popular browser, Mozilla Firefox. Evaluation results suggest that BlogBuster is very accurate when extracting corpora from blogs hosted in the Blogger and Wordpress, while exhibiting a reasonable precision when applied to blogs not hosted in these two popular blogging platforms.
Topics Corpus (creation, annotation, etc.), Information Extraction, Information Retrieval, Web Services
Full paper BlogBuster: A Tool for Extracting Corpora from the Blogosphere
Slides -
Bibtex @InProceedings{PETASIS10.808,
  author = {Georgios Petasis and Dimitrios Petasis},
  title = {BlogBuster: A Tool for Extracting Corpora from the Blogosphere},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC'10)},
  year = {2010},
  month = {may},
  date = {19-21},
  address = {Valletta, Malta},
  editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference Chair) and Khalid Choukri and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Mike Rosner and Daniel Tapias},
  publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)},
  isbn = {2-9517408-6-7},
  language = {english}
 }
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