LLM-Based Web Data Collection for Research Dataset Creation

摘要

Researchers across many fields rely on web data to gain new insights and validate methods. However, assembling accurate and comprehensive datasets typically requires manual review of numerous web pages to identify and record only those data points relevant to specific research objectives. The vast and scattered nature of online information makes this process time-consuming and prone to human error. To address these challenges, we present a human-in-the-loop framework that automates web-scale data collection end-to-end using large language models (LLMs). Given a textual description of a target dataset, our framework (1) automatically formulates search engine queries, (2) navigates the web to identify relevant web pages, (3) extracts the data points of interest, and (4) performs quality control to produce a structured, research-ready dataset. Importantly, users remain in the loop throughout the process and can inspect and adjust the framework’s decisions to ensure alignment with their needs. We introduce techniques to mitigate both search engine bias and LLM hallucinations during data extraction. Experiments across three diverse data collection tasks show that our framework greatly outperforms existing methods, while a user evaluation demonstrates its practical utility. We release our code at https://github.com/tberkane/web-data-collection to help other researchers create custom datasets more efficiently.