Author Unknown: Evaluating Performance of Author Extraction Libraries on Global Online News Articles
This work addresses the need for robust author metadata extraction in multilingual news analysis, but it is incremental as it primarily benchmarks existing tools without introducing a novel method.
The paper tackled the problem of evaluating author extraction libraries on global online news articles by creating a manually coded cross-lingual dataset and testing five existing packages and one customized model, finding that Go-readability and Trafilatura were the most consistent but all showed high variability across languages.
Analysis of large corpora of online news content requires robust validation of underlying metadata extraction methodologies. Identifying the author of a given web-based news article is one example that enables various types of research questions. While numerous solutions for off-the-shelf author extraction exist, there is little work comparing performance (especially in multilingual settings). In this paper we present a manually coded cross-lingual dataset of authors of online news articles and use it to evaluate the performance of five existing software packages and one customized model. Our evaluation shows evidence for Go-readability and Trafilatura as the most consistent solutions for author extraction, but we find all packages produce highly variable results across languages. These findings are relevant for researchers wishing to utilize author data in their analysis pipelines, primarily indicating that further validation for specific languages and geographies is required to rely on results.