A machine learning approach for layout inference in spreadsheets

Research output: Contribution to book/Conference proceedings/Anthology/ReportConference contributionContributedpeer-review

Contributors

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

Abstract

Spreadsheet applications are one of the most used tools for content generation and presentation in industry and the Web. In spite of this success, there does not exist a comprehensive approach to automatically extract and reuse the richness of data maintained in this format. The biggest obstacle is the lack of awareness about the structure of the data in spreadsheets, which otherwise could provide the means to automatically understand and extract knowledge from these files. In this paper, we propose a classification approach to discover the layout of tables in spreadsheets. Therefore, we focus on the cell level, considering a wide range of features not covered before by related work. We evaluated the performance of our classifiers on a large dataset covering three different corpora from various domains. Finally, our work includes a novel technique for detecting and repairing incorrectly classified cells in a post-processing step. The experimental results show that our approach delivers very high accuracy bringing us a crucial step closer towards automatic table extraction.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationKDIR 2016 - 8th International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Information Retrieval
EditorsAna Fred, Jan Dietz, David Aveiro, Kecheng Liu, Jorge Bernardino, Joaquim Filipe, Joaquim Filipe
PublisherSCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications
Pages77-88
Number of pages12
ISBN (electronic)9789897582035
Publication statusPublished - 2016
Peer-reviewedYes

Conference

Title8th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management, IC3K 2016
Duration9 - 11 November 2016
CityPorto
CountryPortugal

External IDs

ORCID /0000-0001-8107-2775/work/142253533

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Keywords

  • Knowledge Discovery, Layout, Machine Learning, Speadsheets, Structure, Tabular