PhilPapers' home page harvester consists in a crawler, a paper detector, a pre-processor and, a metadata extractor.
The crawler regularly checks the tracked pages to look for new links. When it finds one, it calls the paper detector, which tries to guess whether the linked resource is an academic article (or book) rather than, say, the department's homepage, a course handout or a CV. This is currently done by combining a Bayesian classifier applied to the document content with other heuristics such as file type and features of the URL. The results are very reliable: more than 99% of irrelevant links are recognized as such, and there are practically no false negatives (articles dismissed as junk).
Documents harvested from authors's personal pages vary greatly in format and layout. For instance, while most documents have the author name(s) right above or below the title, some contain it only at the very end of the paper, and a substantial number (over 10%) of papers does not specify the author at all. It is therefore important that every feature of a text that might be relevant for extracting meta-data be preserved. To this end, each paper is first converted into an XML document that specifies a) the precise location, font size, etc. of every word in the paper, and b) information about the source page, the original file type, the text of the anchor that led to it, etc. This is what I referred to as 'pre-processing'. A large number of tools are currently employed for this task, including pdftohtml for processing regular PDF files, a modified version of Google's ocropus package for OCR processing of scanned documents, and a xulrunner application (based on the Mozilla web browser) written from scratch to process HTML pages. All third-party software currently employed is open-source.
The meta-data extractor takes the XML document created by the pre-processer and tries to estimate author(s), title and abstract of the document. As a first step, this involves chunking the content into consecutive strings of words that might constitute a title, an author line or a paragraph. These chunks are then classified based on features such as font size, length, position in the document, presence of keywords ('abstract'), etc. In the current prototype, this is done by simply assigning a score to each feature, which does not properly take into account dependencies and independencies between them. In the final version, the classification will probably be carried out by a Maximum Entropy Classifier or a Support Vector Machine. The final step of the extraction is to filter out the author name(s) from chunks that were classified accordingly. (If there are none, the person associated with the source page is chosen.) The meta-data extraction currently gets about 92% of papers right.
At each step, the system keeps tracks of difficulties it encounters,
from which it calculates a 'confidence' score. Documents with low
confidence can thereby be presented to an administrator for
confirmation before adding them to the main corpus.