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Australasian Database Conference

ADC 2018: Databases Theory and Applications pp 345–349Cite as

TEXUS: Table Extraction System for PDF Documents

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 10837))

Abstract

Tables in documents are a rich and under-exploited source of structured data in otherwise unstructured documents. The extraction and understanding of tabular data is a challenging task which has attracted the attention of researchers from a range of disciplines such as information retrieval, machine learning and natural language processing. In this demonstration, we present an end-to-end table extraction and understanding system which takes a PDF file and automatically generates a set of XML and CSV files containing the extracted cells, rows and columns of tables, as well as a complete reading order analysis of the tables. Unlike many systems that work as a black-boxed, ad-hoc solution, our system design incorporates the open, reusable and extensible architecture to support research into, and development of, table-processing systems. During the demo, users will see how our system gradually transforms a PDF document into a set of structured files through a series of processing modules, namely: locating, segmenting and function/structure analysis.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is generally accepted that tables can be understood if one can detect the hierarchical structure of table headers properly and determine how each table data cell can be uniquely accessed through them.

  2. 2.

    http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf.

  3. 3.

    From the PDF specification (http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html.

  4. 4.

    http://www.tamirhassan.com/competition.html.

References

  1. e Silva, A.C., Jorge, A., Torgo, L.: Design of an end-to-end method to extract information from tables. Int. J. Doc. Anal. Recogn. 8(2–3), 144–171 (2006)

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  2. Embley, D.W., Hurst, M., Lopresti, D., Nagy, G.: Table-processing paradigms: a research survey. IJDAR 8(2–3), 66–86 (2006)

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  3. Rastan, R., Paik, H.-Y., Shepherd, J.: TEXUS: a task-based approach for table extraction and understanding. In: DocEng, pp. 25–34 (2015)

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  4. Rastan, R., Paik, H.-Y., Shepherd, J.: A PDF wrapper for table processing. In: DocEng, pp. 115–118 (2016)

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  5. Rastan, R., Paik, H.-Y., Shepherd, J., Haller, A.: Automated table understanding using stub patterns. In: Navathe, S.B., Wu, W., Shekhar, S., Du, X., Wang, X.S., Xiong, H. (eds.) DASFAA 2016. LNCS, vol. 9642, pp. 533–548. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-32025-0_33

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  6. Wang, X.: Tabular abstraction, editing, and formatting. Ph.D. thesis, University of Waterloo (1996)

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science and Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

    Roya Rastan, Hye-Young Paik, John Shepherd & Seung Hwan Ryu

  2. Department of Computing, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia

    Amin Beheshti

Authors
  1. Roya Rastan
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  2. Hye-Young Paik
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  3. John Shepherd
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  4. Seung Hwan Ryu
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  5. Amin Beheshti
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Seung Hwan Ryu .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ICT, Griffith University, Southport, Queensland, Australia

    Junhu Wang

  2. Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Gao Cong

  3. Faculty of Information and Communication Technologies, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia

    Jinjun Chen

  4. The University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Jianzhong Qi

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Cite this paper

Rastan, R., Paik, HY., Shepherd, J., Ryu, S.H., Beheshti, A. (2018). TEXUS: Table Extraction System for PDF Documents. In: Wang, J., Cong, G., Chen, J., Qi, J. (eds) Databases Theory and Applications. ADC 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 10837. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92013-9_30

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92013-9_30

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-92012-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-92013-9

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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