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Analysis of the Arquivo.pt query dataset

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demo-wordcloud-arquivopt3

Last updated on May 12th, 2024 at 02:40 pm

Arquivo.pt query logs are unique resources for research

Arquivo.pt provides a “Google-like” service that enables searching pages and images collected from the web since the 1990s. Notice that Arquivo.pt search complements live-web search engines because it enables temporal search over information that is no longer available online on its original websites.

Analyzing user behavior is an important research topic to understand users’ information needs and enhance the quality of search results. Thus, when a user interacts with a search engine, the system records the user’s actions in a file called the query log. Query logs from web archives are unique resources for research because they describe the real needs of web-archive users about the historical information published online over time.

Research case study

Flavie Gallois and Adam Jatowt from the University of Innsbruck, and Ricardo Campos from the University of Beira Interior and INESC TEC analyzed user search behavior based on the Arquivo.pt search query log dataset collected over a period of 3 months from June to September 2021 (Analyzing User Search Behaviour in Temporal Web Repositories through Search Query Log Analysis).

This study analyzed query features such as length, type or frequency and compared the obtained results with previous work about user search behavior over web-archives and live-web search engines.

This study revealed interesting trends and patterns about how users search for information within web archives, with strong potential for future research work.

How do web-archive users search?

Figure 1 : Distribution of country origin of users
Figure 1 : Distribution of country origin of users
Figure 2: Distribution of languages used in queries
Figure 2: Distribution of languages used in queries

The users came from Portugal in 85.7% of the queries. However, the Portuguese language was identified through automatic language identification of queries as being used in only 37% of the queries. This suggests that users apply other languages than their own to search in web archives.

Users of Arquivo.pt tend to use longer queries with more words and characters in comparison to previous studies, both over web archives and live-web search engines. About 92% of the queries had 5 or fewer terms (average of 25 characters), with 3 being the most common number of submitted terms. In previous work about search behavior in web archives, it was observed that users tended to submit from 1 to 3 terms per query, with 1 term as the most common submission.

Users tend to issue multiple queries within a session instead of a single query, possibly indicating a need for refining their search queries or exploring multiple options for inquiry.

87,7% of the queries submitted to Arquivo.pt used Desktop Browsers, despite Arquivo.pt providing mobile-friendly user interfaces. Old web-archived pages are not responsive and render poorly on mobile devices. Thus, it is expectable that users mostly use web archives through their desktops.

Figure 3: Arquivo.pt users can refine the time span of their queries by using the From and To datepickers.
Figure 3: Arquivo.pt users can refine the time span of their queries by using the From and To datepickers.

Users refined the time span of the search (using the datepickers) in about 50% of queries which indicates awareness of temporal needs peculiar to web-archive usage. Interestingly, users modified the From datepicker more frequently than the To datepicker. Notice that keeping the default time span may fit the user information needs and does not necessarily indicate the lack of awareness about the existence of the function to define time span (peculiar to web-archive search).

Only a small percentage of users included specific years in their query terms (4%), potentially suggesting that in these cases the time span function was insufficient, or unnoticed by some users.

The obtained results suggest that users are more conscious of their information needs and have improved their search techniques to be more effective over web-archives instead of just using them out of curiosity as first-comers.

What is searched in a web-archive?

The authors of the study applied automatic named entity recognition over the user queries and derived a set of word clouds that graphically provide a glimpse of the most common information needs of Arquivo.pt users:

Figure 4: Word cloud of the most frequent query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 4: Word cloud of the most frequent query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 6: The most frequent Geographical Locations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 6: The most frequent Geographical Locations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 6: The most frequent Organizations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt
Figure 6: The most frequent Organizations in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt
Figure 7: The most frequent Persons in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.
Figure 7: The most frequent Persons in query terms submitted to Arquivo.pt.

Access to research Arquivo.pt query dataset

Arquivo.pt released a set of resources to support research studies over its query log dataset:

Evaluation Metrics for web-archive search

The first step to understand user behavior is to define evaluation metrics. Defining metrics is a powerful tool to set long and short-term goals to decide which new products and features should be released to the users.

We share a work-in-progress report which aggregates information about Web Archive Search Evaluation Metrics. This contributes to comparing users’ search behavior between live-web and web-archive search engines. Feel free to comment directly on the collaborative document or to contact us.

This report also provides a summary of references about previous work, query workflows and structure of the corresponding query logs produced by Arquivo.pt, to facilitate the work from the researchers to study these data sets.

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Artificial Intelligence processes data from Arquivo.pt

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Artificial Intelligence AI

Last updated on July 16th, 2024 at 08:33 am

Artificial Intelligence (AI), covers various areas of knowledge, such as linguistics and computing, and is present in the new technologies used by citizens on a daily basis.

For example, when we search for information on the Internet and the computer generates an amazingly accurate response, in a language very close to our own.

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is what allows machines to perfect the algorithm that generates these answers tailored to Internet users.

The problem is that natural language processing models have been developed more for the English language and less for Portuguese and other languages with less representation.

The more the processing models are trained on a language, the better they will be able to interpret the complexities of the language. But this is only possible if quality data is available.

Portuguese text collection on Arquivo.pt available for research

Arquivo.pt appears here as the largest Portuguese-language textual dataset in Portugal, available in open access, for researchers to train NLP models.

In recent years, researchers from various research groups and projects have drawn attention to the usefulness of preserved web data for large-scale processing.

Arquivo.pt has more than 1 Petabyte of preserved web content dating back to the 1990s, including everything that can be found on web pages. It’s not just text, but also images, audio files, video, page code and various metadata.

The content is accessible via the search interface and the Arquivo.pt APIs.

In order to make it easier to download archived resources from the web, Arquivo.pt has created indexes for researchers in CDXJ format.

GlórIA, a model for the Portuguese language

One of the projects that used Arquivo.pt to obtain large amounts of text is called GlórIA and is a large-scale language model (LLM) focused on the European Portuguese language.

“Despite the abundance of LLMs for many high-resource languages, the availability of such models remains limited for European Portuguese” as the authors of GlórIA project, Ricardo Lopes, João Magalhães, David Semedo, researchers at the NOVA School of Science and Technology, explain in their article GlórIA – A Generative and Open Large Language Model for Portuguese.

The model used 35 billion tokens, or expressions that machines can process, from various sources.

Arquivo.pt contributed a collection of 1.4M European Portuguese archived news and periodicals.

You can try generating text in European Portuguese using the GlórIA API inference on the Hugging Face Model card.

If you want to develop a project or study using Arquivo.pt, you can start your research and, if you need help, contact us.

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Cross-lingual research datasets on 2019 European Parliamentary Elections

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Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event

Last updated on March 17th, 2024 at 03:04 pm

Arquivo.pt preserved online documents in several languages about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections

The 2019 European Parliamentary Elections were an event of international relevance. The strategy to preserve the relevant information on the World Wide Web is delegated to national institutions. However, the preservation of web pages that document transnational events is not officially assigned. 

The Arquivo.pt team, with the aim of preserving the cross-lingual online content that documents this event, applied a combination of human and automatic selection processes.

The process of generating the collection about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections was performed in two steps.

In the first step, 40 relevant terms in Portuguese about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections were identified, and then, automatically translated into the 24 official languages of the European Union: Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish and Swedish. 

These translations were reviewed in collaboration with the Publications Office of the European Union. Besides that, in parallel, a collaborative list was launched to gather contributions of relevant seeds from the international community.

In the second step, the Arquivo.pt team iteratively ran 6 crawls (99 million web files, 4.8 TB) using different configurations and crawling software, to maximize the quality of the collected content. 

The obtained web-data was aggregated into one special collection identified as EAWP23 and became searchable and accessible through Arquivo.pt in July 2020 (https://arquivo.pt/ee2019).

CLEOPATRA project: Cross-lingual Event-centric Open Analytics Research Academy

Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event
Daniel Gomes and Diego Alves at presenting at CLEOPATRA final event

The CLEOPATRA ITN was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Innovative Training Network aimed to generate ways to better understand the massive digital coverage of major events in Europe over the past decades. 

The main goal was to facilitate advanced cross-lingual processing of textual and visual information related to key contemporary events at large scale and develop innovative methods for efficient access and interaction with multilingual information.

In total, 14 Early-Stage Researchers hosted across 9 European Universities developed their research while enrolled as Ph.D. students. 

Associated partners such as Arquivo.pt contributed to CLEOPATRA by hosting and training early-stage researchers such as Diego Alves. As part of the training program, he conducted a secondment at Arquivo.pt in Lisbon from June to August 2022. 

The idea was to develop part of his research about syntactic structures of EU languages using the textual resources preserved by the Arquivo.pt and exchange knowledge with the web-archiving experts on the strategies to extract and process historical web-data. 

Diego Alves defended his Ph.D thesis entitled Computational typological analysis of syntactic structures in European languages in July 2023 at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Zagreb (Croatia). 

Generating textual datasets for Natural Language Processing

Diego Alves’ work originated cross-lingual datasets about the 2019 European Parliamentary Elections precious for research.

This work will be detailed in chapter “Robustness of Corpus-based Typological Strategies for Dependency Parsing” of the open-access CLEOPATRA book entitled “Event Analytics across Languages and Communities”.

A 3-step Natural Language Processing pipeline was developed to generate research textual datasets that can be used in several types of digital humanities studies:

  1. Extract text: The textual content was extracted from each web-archived URL using the newspaper3k Python library. The language of each extracted text was determined using the langdetect library, to separate the texts written in different languages across distinct files;
  2. Clean extracted texts: a Python script was applied to clean the texts by removing unnecessary information (e.g.: repeated instances, empty lines, etc.);
  3. Double-check of language identification: the language of each cleaned extracted text was verified again to eliminate possible errors originated during the previous steps.

Two new research datasets are openly available!

The result was a dataset of cleaned and language-verified texts publicly available. Each file contains the texts in a given language about the 2019 European Union Elections. The distribution of extracted texts for each language is described in the figure below:

Number of tokens of each corpus extracted from the collection 2019 European Union Elections preserved by Arquivo.pt (EAWP23).
Number of tokens of each corpus extracted from the collection 2019 European Union Elections preserved by Arquivo.pt (EAWP23).

The aforementioned corpus was automatically annotated regarding part-of-speech and dependency relations to generate a corpus with syntactic information which is useful for linguistic studies. 

The multilingual model of the UDify tool (Kondratyuk and Straka, 2019) was applied. 

The texts in these annotated corpora followed the same order of the respective raw-texts files. Each sentence is annotated following the Universal Dependencies framework in the CoNNL-U format, which is the reference in terms of syntactic annotation in Natural Language Processing. Thus, each file in this dataset contains the annotated texts in a given language about the 2019 European Union Elections

The syntactically annotated texts about the 2019 European Elections are publicly available!

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Open dataset about cryptocurrency

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Criptomoedas gráfico

Last updated on August 17th, 2022 at 09:19 am

(Photo: QuoteInspector)

Since 2008 the cryptocurrency market has revolutionised the world by innovating and expanding into other areas (e.g., finance and art). However, with this rapid expansion, many projects are created every day, giving rise to a wide and varied range of websites, technologies and scams. Markets follow financing stages and it is during an initial stage of euphoria that more projects are created.

We believe that as the cryptocurrency market  stabilises, projects/websites are disappearing because funding diminishes or runs out.

Arquivo.pt initiated a new web archive collection that preserves web content that documents Cryptocurrency activities.

This work produced a new open dataset with information documenting each cryptocurrency project, including it is original URLs and links to the corresponding web-archived version in Arquivo.pt. The information sources selected to create this dataset were:

We believe that by creating this new dataset related to cryptocurrencies and by preserving all the corresponding web content, it has the potential to originate innovative scientific contributions in several areas such as Economy or Digital Humanities.

Resources

Researchers who want to carry out studies on the Cryptocurrencies dataset and need earlier access to the collected contents can contact Arquivo.pt.

Presentation at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2022

Arquivo.pt certified as an open data provider

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selo-dados-gov

Last updated on August 17th, 2022 at 08:39 am

Arquivo.pt has been collaborating with Agência Modernização Administrativa (AMA) with the aim of improving the preservation of Public Administration websites.

Collaboration is based on three action points:

AMA is the public organisation responsible for promoting digital means in Public Administration and aims to modernise and simplify citizens’ access to State services.

Arquivo.pt is a service operated by the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia I.P. that preserves data published on the Web between 1996 and the present day, making them accessible to any citizen for memory and research purposes.

EU open data directive includes documents on websites

The Directive (EU) 2019/1024 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on open data and the re-use of public sector information stipulates the following:

“(30) This Directive lays down the definition of the term ‘document’ and that definition should include any part of a document. The term ‘document’ should cover any representation of acts, facts or information — and any compilation of such acts, facts or information — whatever its medium (paper, or electronic form or as a sound, visual or audiovisual recording.
…
(34) To facilitate re-use, public sector bodies should, where possible and appropriate, make documents, including those published on websites, available through an open and machine-readable format and together with their metadata, at the best level of precision and granularity, in a format that ensures interoperability
…
(35) A document should be considered to be in a machine-readable format if it is in a file format that is structured in such a way that software applications can easily identify, recognise and extract specific data from it. Data encoded in files that are structured in a machine-readable format should be considered to be machine-readable data. A machine-readable format can be open or proprietary. They can be formal standards or not.
…
(60) The Commission should facilitate the cooperation among Member States and support the design, testing, implementation and deployment of interoperable electronic interfaces that enable more efficient and secure public services.
…
Arquivo.pt is a public service that has the mission of preserving documents published on Internet sites to enable their long-term open access and provides interoperable electronic interfaces (APIs) for their automatic processing.

The Portuguese Law No. 68/2021 of 2021-08-26 approves the general principles on open data and transposes the European Directive.

Arquivo.pt was certified as a Public Administration open data provider

The AMA recognized Arquivo.pt as a public service and open data provider and awarded its certification seal on the Open Data Portal.

Arquivo.pt collects general information published on the Web of interest to the Portuguese community. However, it is also responsible for the preservation of Public Administration websites, such as the Portal do Governo, in collaboration with the Management Center for the Government Electronic Network (CEGER).

Any citizen can access the open data resulting from these historical archives and, for example, search for official information published on the websites of successive governments.

In 2021, Arquivo.pt provided open access to over 10 billion files (721 TB) from 27 million websites. The open data preserved by Arquivo.pt can be explored through the search interface, automatically through API (https://arquivo.pt/api) or by reusing derived datasets.

Derived datasets available on the Open Data Portal

Besides the original web artefacts preserved at Arquivo.pt, this service has generated open datasets derived from its activities, which are now available in open access so that they can be reused:

Resources list

Video presentation at the IIPC Web Archiving Conference 2022