GraWiTas: A grammar-based wikipedia talk page parser

Abstract

Wikipedia offers researchers unique insights into the collaboration and communication patterns of a large self-regulating community of editors. The main medium of direct communication between editors of an article is the article's talk page. However, a talk page file is unstructured and therefore difficult to analyse automatically. A few parsers exist that enable its transformation into a structured data format. However, they are rarely open source, support only a limited subset of the talk page syntax - resulting in the loss of content - and usually support only one export format. Together with this article we offer a very fast, lightweight, open source parser with support for various output formats. In a preliminary evaluation it achieved a high accuracy. The parser uses a grammar- based approach - offering a transparent implementation and easy extensibility.