Aravot.am

Index

How to get to the index of each day and where the main archive page is.

1998 - 2000

Armenian

• Main archive page : http://archive.aravot.am/index_arc.html

Articles by date

• Template : http://archive.aravot.am/[year]/[month]/[day]/index_[month][day].html

ie: http://archive.aravot.am/1999/dectember/22/index_dec22.html'

2000

Armenian

• Main archive page : http://archive.aravot.am/arc_00_01.htm

Articles by date

• Template : http://archive.aravot.am/2000new/aravot_arm/[month]/[day]/aravot_index.htm

ie : http://archive.aravot.am/2000new/aravot_arm/oktember/20/aravot_index.htm

• Note: Beware of spelling of some months: October = oktember

2001

Armenian

• Main archive page : http://archive.aravot.am/arc_00_01.htm

Articles by date

• Template : http://archive.aravot.am/2001/aravot_arm/[month]/[day]/aravot_index.htmItalic text

ie : http://archive.aravot.am/2001/aravot_arm/january/13/aravot_index.htm

2002 - 2003

Armenian

• Main archive page : http://archive.aravot.am/aravot_arc_2002.htm

Articles by date

• Template : http://archive.aravot.am/[year]/aravot_arm/[month]/[day]/aravot_index.htm

ie : http://archive.aravot.am/2002/aravot_arm/February/7/aravot_index.htm

ie : http://archive.aravot.am/2003/aravot_arm/January/15/aravot_index.htm

• Note for 1998 - 2003

• English and Russian articles most likely, do not exist.

• The parent directories cannot be accessed, so it is not for certain.

ie : http://archive.aravot.am/2003

2004 - 2011 October

• 2004

• Main archive page : http://www.aravot.am/aravot_arc_2004.htm

• 2005 - 2011

• Main archive page : http://www.aravot.am/aravot_arc.htm

Articles by date

• Template http://www.aravot.am/[year]/aravot_[language]/[month]/[date]/aravot_index.htm

[language] is one of the following: arm, eng, rus

Examples

Armenian

http://www.aravot.am/2004/aravot_arm/December/4/aravot_index.htm

English

http://www.aravot.am/2004/aravot_eng/December/4/aravot_index.htm

Russian

http://www.aravot.am/2004/aravot_rus/December/4/aravot_index.htm

2011 October 21 - Present

Articles by date

• Template :http://www.aravot.am/[lang]/[year]/[month]/[day]/[articleNumber]/

ie : http://www.aravot.am/en/2011/12/26/21854/

Examples

English

http://www.aravot.am/en/2011/12/26/21854/

Russian

http://www.aravot.am/ru/2011/12/26/21854/

Armenian

http://www.aravot.am/2011/12/26/21854/

• Note: For Armenian, [lang] is taken out

• Note: Not all articles exist in all three languages (as shown in the examples)

Scraping

1998 - 2003

Difficulty: Medium

• The only language found is Armenian.

• Start at the index.htm of each date.

• Parse for any links to articles.

• Sometime these articles are only summaries of a few. So you would have to search for possible links within each of these.

Example

• index.htm

http://archive.aravot.am/2001/aravot_arm/january/13/aravot_index.htm

• First link on the left goes directly to an article

http://archive.aravot.am/2001/aravot_arm/january/13/aravot_index.htm

• Second link goes to a summary page

http://archive.aravot.am/2001/aravot_arm/january/13/aravot_politik.htm

2004 - 2011

Difficulty: Hard

• Articles can be in Armenian, Russian or English, but not every article is in every language.

• There are also some huge holes in the archive for languages other than Armenian

• 2004, English only has 2 months

http://www.aravot.am/2004/aravot_eng/

• Easy to download all the articles from one day

• Difficult to match article to article form different languages

• File names for the same articles are not always the same

• Some articles exist in one language but not the other

• Index page are not always the same either

http://www.aravot.am/2004/aravot_arm/December/4/aravot_index.htm

http://www.aravot.am/2004/aravot_eng/December/4/aravot_index.htm

2011 October 21 - Present

Difficulty: Easy

• Giving a range of dates, go to an archive of each day in all three languages.

Example

http://www.aravot.am/ru/2011/12/26/

• Scrape all the article links, then find the article full text

• Save html with date, language, article number

• Try to match articles with same date and article number.

• Using only article number should be safe enough, but date would make them more unique

Scraping and aligning

How to scrape, segment, and align text from aravot.am:

Scraping

English, Russian, and Armenian articles' content will be scraped from aravot.am.

Write the Python script with Beautiful Soup, which aids in screen scraping. Loop through the archive pages for each day (and month and year) of the given range and for each language to get all the article URLs.

Loop through all the article URLs for each day and language and get the HTML tags that store article contents (e.g. <pre>, <p>, etc.) by using Beautiful Soup. Append the contents to a string.

Sentence Segmentation

Some things need to be done with the content string before tokenising it. For English, smart quotes should be replaced. This is an example code snippet:

output_en=output_en.replace('“','"')
output_en=output_en.replace('”','"')
output_en=output_en.replace("‘","'")
output_en=output_en.replace("’","'")

Please refer to the sentence segmentation page for sentence tokenisation. NLTK Punkt can be used.

After tokenisation, Article contents can be saved to a file. The file structure can be: year/month (the month folder contains the articles, in all three languages, for that month). You will have to loop through this process for all files for sentence segmentation.

Sentence Aligning

Hunalign will be used to align sentences from two languages. For example, hy-en and hy-ru pairs articles can be ran through.

Hunalign can be downloaded from here. To build Hunalign on Linux/Unix/Mac OS X, run these commands in the directory where Hunalign was downloaded:

tar zxvf hunalign-1.1.tgz
cd hunalign-1.1/src/hunalign
make

Hunalign needs a bilingual dictionary:

The dictionary consists of newline-separated dictionary items. An item consists of a target languge phrase and a source language phrase, separated by the ” @ ” sequence. Multiword phrases are allowed. The words of a phrase are space-separated as usual. IMPORTANT NOTE: In the current version, for historical reasons, the target language phrases come first. Therefore the ordering is the opposite of the ordering of the command-line arguments or the results.

(The above quote is from here.) A sample Armenian to English dictionary based on Apertium's hye-eng bidix (converted to a Hunalign-compatible dictionary format via a simple Python script) can be found here.

Information about all Hunalign commands can be found here.

If you do not have a bilingual dictionary, you can use the -realign argument.

Hunalign will build its own dictionary based on the two text files (in two languages) that you input. You can input a 0 byte file as a placeholder for the dictionary argument.

Hunalign is used like this:

hunalign [ common_arguments ] [ -hand=hand_align_file ] dictionary_file source_text target_text

Use the -utf argument to input and output in UTF-8.

Use the -bisent argument to only print bisentences (one-to-one alignment segments).

An example command would be:

src/hunalign/hunalign  -utf -bisent -realign -text dict.txt en_2012_06_23_84517.txt hy_2012_06_23_84517.txt

In this command:

• The command is executed in Hunspell's root directory.
• The -utf argument (explained above) is used.
• The -bisent command (explained above) is used.
• The bilingual dictionary used is called dict.txt
• en_2012_06_23_84517.txt is the file in the source language.
• hy_2012_06_23_84517.txt is the file in the target language.

You need to loop through all the files that you generated after the sentence segmentation step. You can create a simple Python script to do so:

os.popen('~/hun3/hunalign-1.1/src/hunalign/hunalign -utf -bisent -text dict.txt '+en+' '+hy+' > ~/hun3/hunalign-1.1/align/'+year+'/'+month+'/hy-'+lang+'/'+num).read()

• Hunalign is under this filepath: ~/hun3/hunalign-1.1/src/hunalign/hunalign.
• en is the variable with the filepath to the source language article
• hy is the variable with the filepath to the target language article
• year is the variable with the year (i.e. "2012")
• lang is the variable with the source language ISO code (i.e. "en")
• num is the varaible with the article number (i.e. "1234")
• The output from Hunalign (for each article) is stored inside a directory with the target language and the source language (separated by a hyphen), which is inside a month directory inside a year directory. Their names are their article numbers. (i.e. align/2012/10/hy-en/12345)

The format of the text-style output for Hunalign is:

• Each line contains three columns, separated by tabs.
• The first column in a line contains a sentence from the source language text.
• The second column contains the (supposedly) corresponding sentence from the target language text.
• The third column is a confidence score for the alignment. It averages all the scores to determine the quality of the alignment.
• At the bottom, there will be the quality score. I found that the quality score increases with the amount of content in the input articles.