Structure in on-line documents

Document Recognition and Retrieval XIII, 2006

When designers develop a document layout their objective is to convey a specific message and provoke a specific response from the audience. Design principles provide the foundation for identifying document components and relations among them to extract implicit knowledge from the layout. Variable Data Printing enables the production of personalized printing jobs for which traditional proofing of all the job instances could result unfeasible. This paper explains a rule-based system that uses design principles to segment and understand document context. The system uses the design principles of repetition, proximity, alignment, similarity, and contrast as the foundation for the strategy in document segmentation and understanding which holds a strong relation with the recognition of artifacts produced by the infringement of the constraints articulated in the document layout. There are two main modules in the tool: the geometric analysis module; and the design rule engine. The geometric analysis module extracts explicit knowledge from the data provided in the document. The design rule module uses the information provided by the geometric analysis to establish logical units inside the document. We used a subset of XSL-FO, sufficient for designing documents with an adequate amount complexity. The system identifies components such as headers, paragraphs, lists, images and determines the relations between them, such as header-paragraph, header-list, etc. The system provides accurate information about the geometric properties of the components, detects the elements of the documents and identifies corresponding components between a proofed instance and the rest of the instances in a Variable Data Printing Job.

2010

Abstract The aim of this paper is to explore how well the task of text vs. nontext distinction can be solved in online handwritten documents using only offline information. Two systems are introduced. The first system generates a document segmentation first. For this purpose, four methods originally developed for machine printed documents are compared: xy cut, morphological closing, Voronoi segmentation, and whitespace analysis. A state-of-the art classifier then distinguishes between text and non-text zones.

… . of International Workshop on Document …, 2000

Document image processing is a crucial process in the office automation and begins from the 'OCR' phase with difficulty of the document 'analysis' and 'understanding'. This paper presents a hybrid and comprehensive approach to document structure analysis. Hybrid in the sense, that it makes use of layout (geometrical) as well as textual features of a given document. These features are the base for potential conditions which in turn are used to express fuzzy matched rules of an underlying rule base. Rules can be formulated based on features which might be observed within one specific layout object. But furthermore, rules can also express dependencies between different layout objects. In addition to its rule driven analysis, which allows an easy adaptation to specific domains with their specific logical objects, the system contains domain-independent markup algorithms for common objects (e.g. lists).

2003

Abstract This paper describes on-going work in the development of a document layout analysis system based on text line segments. It describes two novel algorithms: gapped text line finding, which can identify text line segments, taking into account per-text line font information for the determination of where text line segments break, and reading order recovery for text line segments using topological sorting. An extension of the approach to a probabilistic maximum likelihood framework is discussed.

Proceedings of the eleventh international conference on Information and knowledge management - CIKM '02, 2002

Most information extraction systems focus on the textual content of the documents. They treat documents as sequences of words, disregarding the physical and typographical layout of the information. While this strategy helps in focusing the extraction process on the key semantic content of the document, much valuable information can also be derived form the document physical appearance. Often, fonts, physical positioning and other graphical characteristics are used to provide additional context to the information. This information is lost with pure-text analysis.

Sadhana, 1993

We describe the organization and several components of an automated document processing system that begins with digitized images of documents and produces representations at higher levels. Such representations inlcude: the visual sketch (connected components extracted from the background), physical layout (spatial extents of blocks corresponding to text, graphics), logical layout (grouping of strings into words and phrases), and block primitives (e.g., recognised characters and words in text blocks, recognition of hand-drawn line drawings i.e. schematic electronic circuits). We describe algorithms for deriving several of the representations and describe the interaction of different modules. The methods are illustrated with examples.

Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 1997

Text segmentation is a method of splitting a document into smaller parts, which is usually called segments. It is widely used in text processing. Each segment has its relevant meaning. Those segments categorized as word, sentence, topic, phrase or any information unit depending on the task of the text analysis. This study presents various reasons of usage of text segmentation for different analyzing approaches. We categorized the types of documents and languages used. The main contribution of this study includes a summarization of 50 research papers and an illustration of past decade (January 2007−January 2017)'s of research that applied text segmentation as their main approach for analysing text. Results revealed the popularity of using text segmentation in analysing different languages. Besides that, the word segment seems to be the most practical and usable segment, as it is the smaller unit than the phrase, sentence or line.

Proceedings of the 15th annual international conference on Computer documentation - SIGDOC '97, 1997

Ugh. Outlines. The very thought makes many writers shudder. I understand the revulsion. As taught in high school and college, the paper outline often seemed an arbitrary chore, a rigid plan we bad to follow even if we came up with a better idea later, a stupid rigamarole of labels and formats from Latin and math. Why did our teachers assign them so often? Well, because our papers were, structurally, a mess. Our teachers hoped that in the process of outlining we would consider various possible structures, and emerge with the most coherent, effective, and convincing organization possible. Alas, most of us just wrote the paper and then cooked up a fake outline to get by. We neatly avoided getting any benefit out of all those outlines. Ten years ago, with the invention of electronic outlining, the world received a tool that actually made it possible to get that benefit out of outlining. The electronic outliner made it easy to create and revise an intellectual structure, analyzing the hierarchy and sequence more rigorously than ever before, then carrying out more than a dozen structuring activities. But, given the world's prejudice against outlining, a vast silence greeted these new products. True, they were gradually incorporated into word processors and presentation packages, but the outlining modules have not been widely used until recently, when two interrelated challenges arose, which these modules help us solve. Pen&sion to make digit&hnrd copies of all or pnrt ofthis mnterinl for personal or classroom use is gnt~ted without fee provided that the copk are not made or distributed for profit or commercinl advantage. the copy-ri&t notice, the title ofthe publication and its date appear, ad notice is .&en thnt copyri&t is by permission ofthe ACM, Inc. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists. requires specific permission md/or fee.

Crossroads, 2003