# Past Conferences Crawler (with LLM)
A Python script that crawls conferences from and processes them using a local-run LLM (we used [Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2)) to translate the natural language info to a more structured format (json).
## Installation
Download the LLM model to use, specifically we use [`Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2-GGUF`](https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2-GGUF):
```bash
# download the model, ~4GB
$ wget https://huggingface.co/TheBloke/Mistral-7B-Instruct-v0.2-GGUF/blob/main/mistral-7b-instruct-v0.2.Q4_K_M.gguf
```
Install python the requirements:
```bash
# if you want create a venv
$ python -m venv venv
$ source venv/bin/activate
# enable gpu support for llama-cpp
$ export CMAKE_ARGS="-DLLAMA_BLAS=ON -DLLAMA_BLAS_VENDOR=OpenBLAS"
# install requirements
$ pip install -r requirements.txt
```
## Launch
The following command will crawl all the conferences from `https://www.dm.unipi.it/research/past-conferences/` (all pages) and save the results in `conferences.json` as a list of json objects, one per line.
```bash
$ python main.py
```
The output is a list of json objects, one per line. To display the results with `jq`:
```bash
$ jq -s '.' conferences.json
```
## Main idea / Explainaition
We need to parse strings like the following
```html
Statistical and Computational Aspects of Dynamics
Organized by Buddhima
Kasun Fernando Akurugodage (Centro di ricerca matematica Ennio De Giorgi – SNS),
Paolo Giulietti, and Tanja Isabelle Schindler (Universität Wien, Austria). Centro De
Giorgi – SNS, Pisa. December 13 – 16, 2022.
Weekend di lavoro su Calcolo delle Variazioni
Organized by Giuseppe
Buttazzo, Maria Stella Gelli, and Aldo Pratelli. Grand Hotel Tettuccio Montecatini.
November 25 – 27, 2022.
Incontri di geometria algebrica ed aritmetica Milano – Pisa
Department
of Mathematics, Pisa. November 16 – 17, 2022.
```
We compose the following conversation with an LLM, things between `{{ ... }}` are templates that will be replaced before starting generating.
```
INPUT:
Statistical and Computational Aspects of Dynamics
Organized by Buddhima
Kasun Fernando Akurugodage (Centro di ricerca matematica Ennio De Giorgi – SNS),
Paolo Giulietti, and Tanja Isabelle Schindler (Universität Wien, Austria). Centro De
Giorgi – SNS, Pisa. December 13 – 16, 2022.
OUTPUT JSON:
{
"title": "Statistical and Computational Aspects of Dynamics",
"url": "http://www.crm.sns.it/event/507/",
"description": "Organized by Buddhima Kasun Fernando Akurugodage (Centro di ricerca
matematica Ennio De Giorgi – SNS), Paolo Giulietti, and Tanja Isabelle
Schindler (Universität Wien, Austria). Location: Centro De Giorgi - SNS, Pisa.",
"startDate": "2022-12-13",
"endDate": "2022-12-16"
}
INPUT:
{{ conference_html }}
OUTPUT JSON:
```
And the LLM will complete this conversation with a json representation of the `{{ conference_html }}`. The first example is needed to show the model how to convert information from the input html data.