A genetic-based search for adaptive table recognition in spreadsheets

Research output: Contribution to book/conference proceedings/anthology/reportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

  • Elvis Koci - , Chair of Databases, UPC Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech) (Author)
  • Maik Thiele - , Chair of Databases (Author)
  • Oscar Romero - , UPC Polytechnic University of Catalonia (Barcelona Tech) (Author)
  • Wolfgang Lehner - , Chair of Databases (Author)

Abstract

Spreadsheets are very successful content generation tools, used in almost every enterprise to create a wealth of information. However, this information is often intermingled with various formatting, layout, and textual metadata, making it hard to identify and interpret the tabular payload. Previous works proposed to solve this problem by mainly using heuristics. Although fast to implement, these approaches fail to capture the high variability of user-generated spreadsheet tables. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a supervised approach that is able to adapt to arbitrary spreadsheet datasets. We use a graph model to represent the contents of a sheet, which carries layout and spatial features. Subsequently, we apply genetic-based approaches for graph partitioning, to recognize the parts of the graph corresponding to tables in the sheet. The search for tables is guided by an objective function, which is tuned to match the specific characteristics of a given dataset. We present the feasibility of this approach with an experimental evaluation, on a large, real-world spreadsheet corpus.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publication2019 International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)
PublisherIEEE Computer Society, Washington
Pages1274-1279
Number of pages6
ISBN (electronic)978-172812861-0, 978-1-7281-3014-9
Publication statusPublished - Sept 2019
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

SeriesInternational Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition (ICDAR)
ISSN1520-5363

Conference

Title15th IAPR International Conference on Document Analysis and Recognition
Abbreviated titleICDAR 2019
Conference number15
Duration20 - 25 September 2019
LocationInternational Convention Centre
CitySydney
CountryAustralia

External IDs

dblp conf/icdar/KociT0L19
ORCID /0000-0001-8107-2775/work/142253489

Keywords

Keywords

  • Evolutionary, Genetic, Graph, Partitioning, Recognition, Spreadsheet, Table, Tuning, Weights