Evaluation of date extraction tools for Python
Introduction
Although text is ubiquitous on the Web, extracting information from web pages can prove to be difficult, and an important problem remains as to the most efficient way to gather language data. Metadata extraction is part of data mining and knowledge extraction techniques. Dates are critical components since they are relevant both from a philological standpoint and in the context of information technology.
In most cases, immediately accessible data on retrieved webpages do not carry substantial or accurate information: neither the URL nor the server response provide a reliable way to date a web document, i.e. to find when it was written or modified. In that case it is necessary to fully parse the document or apply robust scraping patterns on it.
State of the art
Diverse extraction and scraping techniques are routinely used on web document collections by companies and research institutions alike. Content extraction mostly draws on Document Object Model (DOM) examination, that is on considering a given HTML document as a tree structure whose nodes represent parts of the document to be operated on. Less thorough and not necessarily faster alternatives use superficial search patterns such as regular expressions in order to capture desirable excerpts …
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