fabianhenning/fundus

A very simple news crawler with a funny name

A very simple news crawler in Python. Developed at Humboldt University of Berlin.

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Quick Start | Tutorials | News Sources | Paper

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Fundus is:

• A static news crawler. Fundus lets you crawl online news articles with only a few lines of Python code! Be it from live websites or the CC-NEWS dataset.

• An open-source Python package. Fundus is built on the idea of building something together. We welcome your contribution to help Fundus grow!

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Quick Start

To install from pip, simply do:

pip install fundus

Fundus requires Python 3.8+.

Example 1: Crawl a bunch of English-language news articles

Let's use Fundus to crawl 2 articles from publishers based in the US.

from fundus import PublisherCollection, Crawler

# initialize the crawler for news publishers based in the US
crawler = Crawler(PublisherCollection.us)

# crawl 2 articles and print
for article in crawler.crawl(max_articles=2):
    print(article)

That's already it!

If you run this code, it should print out something like this:

Fundus-Article:
- Title: "Feinstein's Return Not Enough for Confirmation of Controversial New [...]"
- Text:  "Democrats jammed three of President Joe Biden's controversial court nominees
          through committee votes on Thursday thanks to a last-minute [...]"
- URL:    https://freebeacon.com/politics/feinsteins-return-not-enough-for-confirmation-of-controversial-new-hampshire-judicial-nominee/
- From:   FreeBeacon (2023-05-11 18:41)

Fundus-Article:
- Title: "Northwestern student government freezes College Republicans funding over [...]"
- Text:  "Student government at Northwestern University in Illinois "indefinitely" froze
          the funds of the university's chapter of College Republicans [...]"
- URL:    https://www.foxnews.com/us/northwestern-student-government-freezes-college-republicans-funding-poster-critical-lgbtq-community
- From:   FoxNews (2023-05-09 14:37)

This printout tells you that you successfully crawled two articles!

For each article, the printout details:

• the "Title" of the article, i.e. its headline
• the "Text", i.e. the main article body text
• the "URL" from which it was crawled
• the news source it is "From"

Example 2: Crawl a specific news source

Maybe you want to crawl a specific news source instead. Let's crawl news articles from Washington Times only:

from fundus import PublisherCollection, Crawler

# initialize the crawler for The New Yorker
crawler = Crawler(PublisherCollection.us.TheNewYorker)

# crawl 2 articles and print
for article in crawler.crawl(max_articles=2):
    print(article)

Example 3: Crawl articles from CC-NEWS

If you're not familiar with CC-NEWS, check out their paper.

from fundus import PublisherCollection, CCNewsCrawler

# initialize the crawler for news publishers based in the US
crawler = CCNewsCrawler(*PublisherCollection.us)

# crawl 2 articles and print
for article in crawler.crawl(max_articles=2):
  print(article)

Tutorials

We provide quick tutorials to get you started with the library:

1. Tutorial 1: How to crawl news with Fundus
2. Tutorial 2: How to crawl articles from CC-NEWS
3. Tutorial 3: The Article Class
4. Tutorial 4: How to filter articles
5. Tutorial 5: How to search for publishers

If you wish to contribute check out these tutorials:

1. How to contribute
2. How to add a publisher

Currently Supported News Sources

You can find the publishers currently supported here.

Also: Adding a new publisher is easy - consider contributing to the project!

Evaluation benchmark

Check out our evaluation benchmark.

Scraper	Precision	Recall	F1-Score
Fundus	99.89±0.57	96.75±12.75	97.69±9.75
Trafilatura	90.54±18.86	93.23±23.81	89.81±23.69
BTE	81.09±19.41	98.23±8.61	87.14±15.48
jusText	86.51±18.92	90.23±20.61	86.96±19.76
news-please	92.26±12.40	86.38±27.59	85.81±23.29
BoilerNet	84.73±20.82	90.66±21.05	85.77±20.28
Boilerpipe	82.89±20.65	82.11±29.99	79.90±25.86

Cite

Please cite the following paper when using Fundus or building upon our work:

@misc{dallabetta2024fundus,
      title={Fundus: A Simple-to-Use News Scraper Optimized for High Quality Extractions}, 
      author={Max Dallabetta and Conrad Dobberstein and Adrian Breiding and Alan Akbik},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2403.15279},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL}
}

Contact

Please email your questions or comments to Max Dallabetta

Contributing

Thanks for your interest in contributing! There are many ways to get involved; start with our contributor guidelines and then check these open issues for specific tasks.

License

MIT