NDLI: Intelligent crawler for web forums based on improved regular expressions

Content Provider	IEEE Xplore Digital Library
Author	Pavkovic, M. Protic, J.
Copyright Year	2013
Description	Author affiliation: Sch. of Electr. Eng., Univ. of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia (Pavkovic, M.; Protic, J.)
Abstract	In this paper, we present the development and characteristics of a specialized Web-scale forum crawler. The main idea is to crawl relevant forum content from the Web with minimal server resource consumption, and to organize crawled content into logical units, in order to make it easier for further processing and analysis. Forum posts contain relevant information that are of interest to forum crawler. Although forums have different designs, and are built on different technologies, they always have identical logic navigation that connects homepage and particular posts through forum lists and threads by specific URLs. Considering this common implicit navigation, we have optimized Web crawling problem to be URL-type recognition problem. URL-type database and regular expressions are used in order to achieve URL-type recognition. These regular expressions are expanded with special custom characters and commands that gave this forum crawler advantage over other Web based crawlers. The results shown in this paper are obtained by crawling a set of Web forums with different technology, location and design. Each test compared the results obtained by standard Web based crawler and our specialized forum crawler. Our test results show that by crawling only specific data and URL paths on the forum, we have managed to reduce the time of crawling and to achieve lower server resources consumption.
Starting Page	817
Ending Page	820
File Size	759820
Page Count	4
File Format	PDF
e-ISBN	9781479914203
DOI	10.1109/TELFOR.2013.6716355
Language	English
Publisher	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Publisher Date	2013-11-26
Publisher Place	Serbia
Access Restriction	Subscribed
Rights Holder	Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
Subject Keyword	Software packages Databases Crawlers Knowledge based systems Regular expressions URL type Educational institutions Internet Crawler Web search Message systems Forum
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article

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1	Ministry of Education (GoI), Department of Higher Education	Sanctioning Authority	https://www.education.gov.in/ict-initiatives
2	Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur	Host Institute of the Project: The host institute of the project is responsible for providing infrastructure support and hosting the project	https://www.iitkgp.ac.in
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4	Project PI / Joint PI	Principal Investigator and Joint Principal Investigators of the project	Dr. B. Sutradhar bsutra@ndl.gov.in Prof. Saswat Chakrabarti will be added soon
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