We evaluate the quality of article body extraction for commercial services Zyte Automatic Extraction (ours), Diffbot and open-source libraries newspaper3k, readability-lxml, dragnet, boilerpipe, html-text, trafilatura, go-readability, Readability.js, Go-DomDistiller. news-please. Goose3, inscriptis, html2text, jusText, BeautifulSoup. We release evaluation datasets and scripts, and provide more details in a whitepaper.
Article extraction is a task of extracting certain fields of an article (e.g. news or blog post), such as headline, article body, publication date, authors, etc. Article extraction systems must work on any web-site. Here we evaluate only the article body field, as this is one of the most important fields and one of the hardest to get right.
Results of the initial evaluation, done in November 2019:
version F1 precision recall accuracy AutoExtract Nov 2019 0.970 ± 0.005 0.984 ± 0.002 0.956 ± 0.010 0.470 ± 0.037 Diffbot Nov 2019 0.951 ± 0.010 0.958 ± 0.009 0.944 ± 0.013 0.348 ± 0.038 boilerpipe ab3694d 0.860 ± 0.016 0.850 ± 0.016 0.870 ± 0.020 0.006 ± 0.006 dragnet 1b65e7b 0.907 ± 0.014 0.925 ± 0.013 0.889 ± 0.019 0.221 ± 0.030 html-text 0.5.1 0.665 ± 0.015 0.500 ± 0.017 0.994 ± 0.001 0.000 ± 0.000 newspaper3k 0.2.8 0.912 ± 0.014 0.917 ± 0.014 0.906 ± 0.018 0.260 ± 0.032 readability-lxml 0.7.1 0.922 ± 0.014 0.913 ± 0.014 0.931 ± 0.016 0.315 ± 0.035 xpath-text 4.4.2 0.394 ± 0.020 0.246 ± 0.016 0.992 ± 0.001 0.000 ± 0.000
Result of packages added after original evaluation:
version F1 precision recall accuracy trafilatura 0.5.1 0.945 ± 0.009 0.925 ± 0.011 0.966 ± 0.009 0.221 ± 0.031 go_readability bdc8717 0.943 ± 0.007 0.912 ± 0.009 0.975 ± 0.007 0.210 ± 0.030 readability_js Feb 2021 0.887 ± 0.012 0.853 ± 0.013 0.924 ± 0.012 0.149 ± 0.026 go_domdistiller 1c90a88 0.927 ± 0.007 0.901 ± 0.010 0.956 ± 0.010 0.066 ± 0.018 news_please 1.5.17 0.911 ± 0.014 0.917 ± 0.013 0.906 ± 0.018 0.249 ± 0.032 goose3 3.1.8 0.887 ± 0.016 0.930 ± 0.015 0.847 ± 0.021 0.227 ± 0.032 inscriptis 1.1.2 0.679 ± 0.015 0.517 ± 0.017 0.993 ± 0.001 0.000 ± 0.000 html2text 2020.1.16 0.662 ± 0.015 0.499 ± 0.017 0.983 ± 0.002 0.000 ± 0.000 justext 2.2.0 0.802 ± 0.018 0.858 ± 0.017 0.754 ± 0.028 0.088 ± 0.021 beautifulsoup 4.9.3 0.665 ± 0.015 0.499 ± 0.017 0.994 ± 0.001 0.000 ± 0.000
Below you can find more details about the packages and result reproduction.
More details are available:
- In the whitepaper at https://www.zyte.com/whitepaper-ebook/in-depth-analysis-and-evaluation-on-the-quality-of-article-body-extraction/
- In a technical report attached to the v1.0.0 release at https://github.com/scrapinghub/article-extraction-benchmark/releases/tag/v1.0.0
Clone this repo, and use Python 3.6+.
Evaluation does not require any dependencies.
Dependencies listed in requirements.txt are only for re-generating
output files for open-source article extraction libraries.
See below for their installation details.
JSON data format: a dictionary which maps item ids to dictionaries, with the following fields:
articleBody: text of the articleurl: page url (optional)
All files should have the same keys.
Ground truth is in ground-truth.json,
predictions from different systems is in output/*.json files.
HTML files are in html folder. They were fetched with Splash headless
browser with JS disabled by default. They are gzip-compressed and utf-8 encoded.
Screenshots of all pages are not in the repo, they are available on github in the "Releases" section: https://github.com/scrapinghub/article-extraction-benchmark/releases
In addition to benchmarking AutoExtract and Diffbot services, we also benchmark several open-source libraries that work directly on HTML files without a need for rendering or external resources:
- newspaper3k: https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper
- readability-lxml: https://github.com/buriy/python-readability
- dragnet: https://github.com/dragnet-org/dragnet
- boilerpipe: https://github.com/misja/python-boilerpipe
- html-text: https://github.com/TeamHG-Memex/html-text - this is a baseline which extracts the full text of HTML page
- trafilatura: https://github.com/adbar/trafilatura contributed by the author at scrapinghub#4
- go-readability: https://github.com/go-shiori/go-readability
- Readability.js: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
- Go-DomDistiller: https://github.com/markusmobius/go-domdistiller
- news-please: https://github.com/fhamborg/news-please
- Goose3: https://github.com/goose3/goose3
- inscriptis: https://github.com/weblyzard/inscriptis - converts HTML to text with a particular emphasis on nested tables
- html2text: https://github.com/Alir3z4/html2text - converts HTML pages to Markup language
- jusText: https://github.com/miso-belica/jusText - Heuristic based boilerplate removal tool
- BeautifulSoup: https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/bs4/doc/ - Python library for pulling data out of HTML and XML files.
Output from these libraries is already present in the repo in output/*.json files.
They were generated with extractors/run_*.py files.
All dependencies are in requirements.txt.
Note that dragnet may fail to install at first try, as
you need to have numpy and Cython installed, and have libxml2 headers
(libxml2-dev on Ubuntu).
boilerpipe requires a custom installation: use python2, you also need Java
(e.g. install default-jre in Ubuntu), install it with
pip install -e git+https://github.com/misja/python-boilerpipe.git@ab3694d7bf695b73f0684a028e70aa816d63e6cb#egg=boilerpipe
go-readability requires a custom installation: see README in extractors/go_readability.
Readability.js require a custom installation: install nodejs and install cli tool:
npm install -g readability-cli@2.2.1-pre
Go-DomDistiller requires a custom installation: see README in extractors/go_domdistiller.
For evaluation, run:
python3 evaluate.py
We report precision, recall, F1, accuracy and their standard deviation estimated with bootstrap. Please refer to the technical report for more details.
License is MIT.