Tuesday 29 May 2012

Layout-Aware Text Extraction from Full-text PDF of Scientific Articles


Description: The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the almost universally used file format for online scientific publications. It is also notoriously difficult to read and handle computationally, presenting challenges for developers of biomedical text mining or biocuration informatics systems that use the published literature as an information source. To facilitate the effective use of scientific literature in such systems we introduce Layout-Aware PDF Text Extraction (LA-PDFText). The LA-PDFText system focuses only on the textual content of the research articles and is meant as a baseline for further experiments into more advanced extraction methods that handle multi-modal content, such as images and graphs. The system works in a three-stage process: (1) Detecting contiguous text blocks using spatial layout processing to locate and identify blocks of contiguous text, (2) Classifying text blocks into rhetorical categories using a rule-based method and (3) Stitching classified text blocks together in the correct order resulting in the extraction of text from section-wise grouped blocks.

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