From pre-training to query-time augmentation, web-scraped data helps to improve the quality and contextual relevancy of content generated by large language models (LLMs). However, large-scale web scraping to feed LLMs can affect site stability and raise legal, privacy, or ethics concerns. If website owners wish to limit LLM-related web scraping on their site, due to these or other concerns, they may turn to scraper access control mechanisms like the Robots Exclusion Protocol. To be most effective, such mechanisms require site owners to first identify the scrapers that they wish to restrict (e.g., via User-Agent strings). Existing mechanisms to identify LLM-related scrapers rely on voluntary disclosure by companies, one-off experiments by researchers, or crowd-sourced reports -- methods that are neither reliable nor scalable. This paper proposes a novel technique for accurately and automatically inferring LLM-related scrapers. We host dynamic websites that serve unique canary tokens to each visiting scraper, then prompt LLMs for information about our sites. If an LLM consistently generates outputs containing tokens unique to a scraper, it provides evidence of exposure to that scrape
Online data scraping has taken on new dimensions in recent years, as traditional scrapers have been joined by new AI-specific bots. To counteract unwanted scraping, many sites use tools like the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP), which places a robots$.$txt file at the site root to dictate scraper behavior. Yet, the efficacy of the REP is not well-understood. Anecdotal evidence suggests some bots comply poorly with it, but no rigorous study exists to support (or refute) this claim. To understand the merits and limits of the REP, we conduct the first large-scale study of web scraper compliance with robots$.$txt directives using anonymized web logs from our institution. We analyze the behavior of 130 self-declared bots (and many anonymous ones) over 40 days, using a series of controlled robots$.$txt experiments. We find that bots are less likely to comply with stricter robots$.$txt directives, and that certain categories of bots, including AI search crawlers, rarely check robots$.$txt at all. These findings suggest that relying on robots$.$txt files to prevent unwanted scraping is risky and highlight the need for alternative approaches.
The abundant and heterogeneous nature of web content necessitates automated information extraction, and generating scrapers that can be reused across similar web pages offers an effective solution for scalable data extraction. In this work, we propose Co-Scraper, a two-stage framework capable of handling the hierarchical complexity of long HTML documents. By integrating a query-aware DOM pruning mechanism with stable extraction strategy induction, Co-Scraper can effectively transforms web content into executable programmatic wrappers using a fine-tuned Qwen3-8B model. On the test set of SWDE, Co-Scraper achieves state-of-the-art performance with an F1 score of 94.78% and a reuse success rate of 90.39%. This framework significantly enhances the accuracy and resilience of data extraction, providing a highly efficient approach for web data acquisition tasks.
Beam Intercepting Devices (BIDs) include targets, scrapers, collimators, protection absorbers and beam dumps. They enable secondary particle production, shape or clean beams, and protect sensitive components by concentrating beam losses into shielded locations. In high-power proton machines, BIDs operate close to thermo-mechanical limits under intense radiation fields, and their reliability directly impacts accelerator availability. This review summarizes the dominant design drivers (energy deposition, temperature gradients, thermal stress, fatigue, radiation damage and activation), outlines a pragmatic design workflow combining energy-deposition assessment with coupled thermal/structural and fluid dynamic analyses, and reviews representative BIDs at PSI's High Intensity Proton Accelerator (HIPA), including current hardware and developments for the IMPACT project (Isotope and Muon Production using Advanced Cyclotron and Target technology).
LLMs and agents can generate web scrapers from natural-language requirements, but direct generation remains unreliable because of dependency errors, broken selectors, schema mismatches, and heterogeneous page structures. We propose a constrained, verifiable agent framework that shifts LLM output from free-form code to typed JSON collector configurations, combining a six-type collector taxonomy, template and utility-function constraints, static Airflow DAG execution, rule-based quality checking, and structured feedback correction. Experiments on 138 tasks show that the taxonomy supports description-based requirement typing, while confirming that stable instantiation requires completing source, field, and execution constraints beyond the initial description. On 80 independently source-verified tasks, the framework runs with zero execution-stage LLM tokens and the lowest average wall-clock time, trading moderate one-shot quality for a reusable, deterministic, and verifiable execution path suited to repeated scheduled collection. These results position the framework as a reusable, low-cost, and verifiable execution path for repeated open-web data collection.
Modern web scraping struggles with dynamic, interactive websites that require more than static HTML parsing. Current methods are often brittle and require manual customization for each site. To address this, we introduce Webscraper, a framework designed to handle the challenges of modern, dynamic web applications. It leverages a Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) to autonomously navigate interactive interfaces, invoke specialized tools, and perform structured data extraction in environments where traditional scrapers are ineffective. Webscraper utilizes a structured five-stage prompting procedure and a set of custom-built tools to navigate and extract data from websites following the common ``index-and-content'' architecture. Our experiments, conducted on six news websites, demonstrate that the full Webscraper framework, equipped with both our guiding prompt and specialized tools, achieves a significant improvement in extraction accuracy over the baseline agent Anthropic's Computer Use. We also applied the framework to e-commerce platforms to validate its generalizability.
We present PashtoCorp, a 1.25-billion-word corpus for Pashto, a language spoken by 60 million people that remains severely underrepresented in NLP. The corpus is assembled from 39 sources spanning seven HuggingFace datasets and 32 purpose-built web scrapers, processed through a reproducible pipeline with Arabic-script tokenization, SHA-256 deduplication, and quality filtering. At 1.25B words across 2.81 million documents, PashtoCorp is 40x larger than the OSCAR Pashto subset and 83x larger than the previously largest dedicated Pashto corpus. Continued MLM pretraining of XLM-R-base on PashtoCorp reduces held-out perplexity by 25.1% (8.08->6.06). On WikiANN Pashto NER, the pretrained model improves entity F1 by 10% relative (19.0%->21.0%) and reduces training variance nearly 7x; the largest gain appears at 50 training sentences (+27%), with PashtoCorp covering 97.9% of WikiANN entity vocabulary. On Belebele Pashto reading comprehension, Gemma-3n achieves 64.6% accuracy, the first published LLM baseline for Pashto on this benchmark. A leave-one-out source ablation shows that Wikipedia (0.7% of documents) is the most critical source for NER: removing it alone reduces entity F1 by
The proliferation of online news poses a challenge to extracting structured timelines from unstructured content. While recent studies have shown that Large Language Models (LLMs) can assist Timeline Summarization (TLS), these approaches primarily treat models as passive generators. The emergence of Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) presents an opportunity to reason over events actively, enabling iterative evidence acquisition, the detection of missing events, and the validation of temporal consistency. To systematically leverage the reasoning capabilities of LRMs, we propose TimelineReasoner, a novel framework that shifts TLS from static generation to an active, reasoning-driven process. Unlike prior work, TimelineReasoner adopts a two-stage framework: Global Cognition, which tracks events at a macroscopic level and continuously updates a global event memory, and Detail Exploration, which identifies informational gaps and refines the timeline via targeted document retrieval. To support this, TimelineReasoner incorporates several specialized mechanisms, including an Event Scraper for retrieving temporal event descriptions, a Timeline Updater for refining the timeline, and a Supervisor f
Web information extraction (WIE) is the task of automatically extracting data from web pages, offering high utility for various applications. The evaluation of WIE systems has traditionally relied on benchmarks built from HTML snapshots captured at a single point in time. However, this offline evaluation paradigm fails to account for the temporally evolving nature of the web; consequently, performance on these static benchmarks often fails to generalize to dynamic real-world scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce \dataset, a new benchmark designed for evaluating WIE systems directly against live websites. Based on trusted and permission-granted websites, we curate natural language queries that require information extraction of various data categories, such as text, images, and hyperlinks. We further design these queries to represent four levels of complexity, based on the number and cardinality of attributes to be extracted, enabling a granular assessment of WIE systems. In addition, we propose Visual Grounding Scraper (VGS), a novel multi-stage agentic framework that mimics human cognitive processes by visually narrowing down web page content to extract desired information. E
Bibliographic catalogues store millions of data. The use of computer techniques such as web-scraping allows the extraction of data in an efficient and accurate manner. The recent emergence of ChatGPT is facilitating the development of suitable prompts that allow the configuration of scraping to identify and extract information from databases. The aim of this article is to define how to efficiently use prompts engineering to elaborate a suitable data entry model, able to generate in a single interaction with ChatGPT-4o, a fully functional web-scraper, programmed in PHP language, adapted to the case of bibliographic catalogues. As a demonstration example, the bibliographic catalogue of the National Library of Spain with a dataset of thousands of records is used. The findings present an effective model for developing web-scraping programs, assisted with AI and with the minimum possible interaction. The results obtained with the model indicate that the use of prompts with large language models (LLM) can improve the quality of scraping by understanding specific contexts and patterns, adapting to different formats and styles of presentation of bibliographic information.
We present a benchmark for evaluating AI models and agents on real-world formal software verification tasks. We first scrape 11,039 property-based tests (PBTs) from real-world Python repositories, then automatically translate 2,772 of them (25%) into 9,415 Lean 4 specifications with sorry placeholders (about 3 formalizations/PBT; we retain multiple attempts when none dominates on quality metrics). Translating PBTs into Lean specifications is challenging: it requires modeling Python semantics in Lean, inferring the logical property encoded in an imperative PBT, and handling the inherent difficulties of dependently-typed programming in a seldom-used language. We describe a three-agent LLM pipeline for transpiling PBTs into Lean specifications, evaluate coverage and quality metrics, and provide baselines for proof generation using several automated and model based approaches. All code (scraper and agents) and data (PBTs and Lean specifications) are open source. Our benchmark aims to drive progress on the underexplored problem of AI-assisted formal verification of real-world software, which is of increasing interest as AI produces more and more of the world's code.
The effect of a pressure-dependent viscosity on the behaviour of the viscous scraper problem is investigated. In particular, it is found that the effect is qualitatively different for the classical scraper (i.e., a drag in) problem and the reverse scraper (i.e., a drag out) problem.
Snapchat's Snap Map is an ephemeral stream of geotagged public video and image stories, but the platform provides no documented API, no prior work describes a reproducible system for collecting this data at city scale, and no tool exists for managing and exploring the collected data interactively. We present SnapScope, an integrated platform that pairs a back-end collection pipeline with a web-based front end for scraper management, interactive data exploration, side-by-side neighborhood comparison, and data export. We deploy the platform over Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, collecting 515,364 unique public snaps across 23 days on a 1 km grid of 2,740 query points. A saturation probe over 21 consecutive runs shows that 94.8% of returned observations are duplicates of already-stored records. We provide a privacy-safe aggregate dataset under CC BY 4.0. The platform is city-agnostic and redeployable by substituting grid coordinates and boundary polygons.
GenAI companies are strip-mining the web. Their scraping bots harvest content at an unprecedented scale, circumventing technical barriers to fuel billion-dollar models while creators receive nothing. Courts have enabled this exploitation by misunderstanding what property rights protect online. The prevailing view treats websites as mere repositories of intellectual property and dismisses trespass claims absent server damage. That framework grants AI companies presumptive access while ignoring the economic devastation they inflict. But the content is severable from the website itself. This paper reframes the debate: websites are personal property as integrated digital assets subject to the same exclusionary rights as physical chattels. When scrapers bypass access controls and divert traffic that sustains a website's value, they commit actionable trespass. The law need not create new protections; it need only apply existing property principles to digital space. Courts and litigants have struggled to police unwanted, large-scale scraping because copyright preemption often narrows available claims, leaving copyright and its fair use defense as the primary battleground. Trespass to chat
As automation bot technology and Artificial Intelligence is evolving rapidly, conventional human verification techniques like voice CAPTCHAs and knowledge-based authentication are becoming less effective. Bots and scrapers with Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities can now detect and solve visual challenges, emulate human like typing patterns, and avoid most security tests, leading to high-volume threats like credential stuffing, account abuse, ad fraud, and automated scalping. This leaves a vital gap in identifying real human users versus advanced bots. We present a novel technique for distinguishing real human users based on hardware interaction signals to address this issue. In contrast to conventional approaches, our method leverages human interactions and a cryptographically attested User Presence (UP) flag from trusted hardware to verify genuine physical user engagement providing a secure and reliable way to distinguish authentic users from automated bots or scripted routines. The suggested approach was thoroughly assessed in terms of performance, usability, and security. The system demonstrated consistent throughput and zero request failures under prolonged concurrent us
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) offers new opportunities for reconstructing these unrecorded memory scenes, yet existing web-based tools undermine users' sense of agency through disengaging and unpredictable interactions. In this work, we advance three design arguments about how slow, tangible interaction can reshape human-AI relationships by making temporality, embodied agency, and generative processes experientially legible. We instantiate these arguments by presenting Memory Printer, a tangible design that combines silk-screen printing metaphors with text-to-image generation. The design features layered reconstruction that decomposes image generation into incremental steps, a physical wooden scraper enabling embodied control over image revelation, and built-in printing that produces tangible photos. We examine these arguments through a comparative study with 24 participants, exploring how participants engage with, interpret, and respond to this interaction stance. The study surfaces both opportunities -- such as vivid memory evocation, heightened sense of control, and creative exploration -- and critical tensions, including risks of false memory formation, algorithmic b
This paper introduces Fundus, a user-friendly news scraper that enables users to obtain millions of high-quality news articles with just a few lines of code. Unlike existing news scrapers, we use manually crafted, bespoke content extractors that are specifically tailored to the formatting guidelines of each supported online newspaper. This allows us to optimize our scraping for quality such that retrieved news articles are textually complete and without HTML artifacts. Further, our framework combines both crawling (retrieving HTML from the web or large web archives) and content extraction into a single pipeline. By providing a unified interface for a predefined collection of newspapers, we aim to make Fundus broadly usable even for non-technical users. This paper gives an overview of the framework, discusses our design choices, and presents a comparative evaluation against other popular news scrapers. Our evaluation shows that Fundus yields significantly higher quality extractions (complete and artifact-free news articles) than prior work. The framework is available on GitHub under https://github.com/flairNLP/fundus and can be simply installed using pip.
Large Language Model (LLM) services such as ChatGPT, DALLE, and Cursor have quickly become essential for society, businesses, and individuals, empowering applications such as chatbots, image generation, and code assistance. The complexity of LLM systems makes them prone to failures and affects their reliability and availability, yet their failure patterns are not fully understood, making it an emerging problem. However, there are limited datasets and studies in this area, particularly lacking an open-access tool for analyzing LLM service failures based on incident reports. Addressing these problems, in this work we propose FAILS, the first open-sourced framework for incident reports collection and analysis on different LLM services and providers. FAILS provides comprehensive data collection, analysis, and visualization capabilities, including:(1) It can automatically collect, clean, and update incident data through its data scraper and processing components;(2) It provides 17 types of failure analysis, allowing users to explore temporal trends of incidents, analyze service reliability metrics, such as Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) and Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF);(3) It leverag
Knowledge graphs (KGs) are increasingly used to represent biomedical information in structured, interpretable formats. However, existing biomedical KGs often focus narrowly on molecular interactions or adverse events, overlooking the rich data found in drug leaflets. In this work, we present (1) a hackable, end-to-end pipeline to create KGs from unstructured online content using a web scraper and an LLM; and (2) a curated dataset, MEDAKA, generated by applying this method to publicly available drug leaflets. The dataset captures clinically relevant attributes such as side effects, warnings, contraindications, ingredients, dosage guidelines, storage instructions and physical characteristics. We evaluate it through manual inspection and with an LLM-as-a-Judge framework, and compare its coverage with existing biomedical KGs and databases. We expect MEDAKA to support tasks such as patient safety monitoring and drug recommendation. The pipeline can also be used for constructing KGs from unstructured texts in other domains. Code and dataset are available at https://github.com/medakakg/medaka.
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}