Wikipedia Extractor

Goal

This tool extracts main text from xml Wikipedia dump files, producing a text corpus, which is useful for training unsupervised part-of-speech taggers, n-gram language models, etc.

Tool

There are three versions of Wikipedia Extractor:

The original, works with Python 2.x and outputs multiple files. http://code.google.com/p/natural-language-qa/source/browse/MakeCorpus/WikiExtractor.py License GPL-V3.

Guampa's version, works with Python 3.x and outputs multiple files. https://github.com/hltdi/guampa/blob/master/wikipedia-import/WikiExtractor.py License GPL-V3

New version, a modified version of Guampa's, works with Python 3.x and outputs a single file https://svn.code.sf.net/p/apertium/svn/trunk/apertium-tools/WikiExtractor.py

Applicable

Work well : Wikipedia, Wikivoyage, Wikibooks

With problem: Wiktionary (Mistakenly, not all articles fully included, and foreign words' explanations included.)

(Thanks to the feedback by Per Tunedal!)

New Version

The new version was written by BenStobaugh during GCI-2013 and can be downloaded from SVN at https://svn.code.sf.net/p/apertium/svn/trunk/apertium-tools/WikiExtractor.py

This version is much simpler than the old version. This version auto-removes any formatting and only outputs the text to one file. To use it, simply use the following command in your terminal, where dump.xml is the Wikipedia dump

   $ python3 WikiExtractor.py --infn dump.xml.bz2

This will run through all of the articles, get all of the text and put it in wiki.txt. This version also supports compression (BZip2 and Gzip), so you can use dump.xml.bz2 or dump.xml.gz instead of dump.xml. You can also compress (Bzip2) the output file by adding --compress to the command.

You can also run python3 WikiExtractor.py --help to get more details.

Old Version

1. Get the script

  http://code.google.com/p/natural-language-qa/source/browse/MakeCorpus/WikiExtractor.py

2. Download the Wikipedia dump file

  http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html

Take Chinese as an example, download the file zhwiki-20130625-pages-articles.xml.bz2 on this page http://dumps.wikimedia.org/zhwiki/20130625/. Alternatively, we can download the latest version on this page, http://dumps.wikimedia.org/zhwiki/lastest/

3. Use the script

mkdir output

bzcat zhwiki-20130625-pages-articles.xml.bz2 | ./WikiExtractor -o output

cat output/*/* > zhwiki.text

Optionally, we can use

"-c" for compression for saving disk space, and

"-b" for setting specified bytes per output file.

More information please type "./WikiExtractor --help".

Ok, let's have a cup of tea and come back an hour later. The output should be output/AA/wikiXX, where wikiXX are the extracted texts.

4. clean up "<>" tags

We are only one step away from the final text corpus, because there are still links in wikiXX files. Let's use the following tiny script to filter out "<>" tags and special "__XXX__" marks.

#! /usr/bin/python
# -*- coding:utf-8 -*-
import sys
import re
re1 = re.compile(ur"<.*?>")       # ref tags
re2 = re.compile(ur"__[A-Z]+__")  # special marks e.g. __TOC__ __NOTOC__
line = sys.stdin.readline()
while line != "":
	line = re1.sub("", re2.sub("", line))
	print line,
	line = sys.stdin.readline()

Save the above lines in a file filter.py, and:

python filter.py < zhwiki.text > zhwiki.filter.text