AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2404.12753v2
• Date: Thu, 26 Sep 2024 09:17:10 GMT
• Title: AutoScraper: A Progressive Understanding Web Agent for Web Scraper Generation
• Authors: Wenhao Huang, Zhouhong Gu, Chenghao Peng, Zhixu Li, Jiaqing Liang, Yanghua Xiao, Liqian Wen, Zulong Chen,
• Abstract summary: Web scraping is a powerful technique that extracts data from websites, enabling automated data collection, enhancing data analysis capabilities, and minimizing manual data entry efforts. Existing methods, wrappers-based methods suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website. We introduce the paradigm of generating web scrapers with large language models (LLMs) and propose AutoScraper, a two-stage framework that can handle diverse and changing web environments more efficiently.
• Score: 54.17246674188208
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Web scraping is a powerful technique that extracts data from websites, enabling automated data collection, enhancing data analysis capabilities, and minimizing manual data entry efforts. Existing methods, wrappers-based methods suffer from limited adaptability and scalability when faced with a new website, while language agents, empowered by large language models (LLMs), exhibit poor reusability in diverse web environments. In this work, we introduce the paradigm of generating web scrapers with LLMs and propose AutoScraper, a two-stage framework that can handle diverse and changing web environments more efficiently. AutoScraper leverages the hierarchical structure of HTML and similarity across different web pages for generating web scrapers. Besides, we propose a new executability metric for better measuring the performance of web scraper generation tasks. We conduct comprehensive experiments with multiple LLMs and demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework. Resources of this paper can be found at \url{https://github.com/EZ-hwh/AutoScraper}

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