Table recognition in spreadsheets via a graph representation

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

Contributors

Abstract

Spreadsheet software are very popular data management tools. Their ease of use and abundant functionalities equip novices and professionals alike with the means to generate, transform, analyze, and visualize data. As a result, spreadsheets are a great resource of factual and structured information. This accentuates the need to automatically understand and extract their contents. In this paper, we present a novel approach for recognizing tables in spreadsheets. Having inferred the layout role of the individual cells, we build layout regions. We encode the spatial interrelations between these regions using a graph representation. Based on this, we propose Remove and Conquer (RAC), an algorithm for table recognition that implements a list of carefully curated rules. An extensive experimental evaluation shows that our approach is viable. We achieve significant accuracy in a dataset of real spreadsheets from various domains.

Details

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings - 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, DAS 2018
PublisherIEEE, New York [u. a.]
Pages139-144
Number of pages6
ISBN (electronic)9781538633465
Publication statusPublished - 22 Jun 2018
Peer-reviewedYes

Publication series

Series2018 13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems (DAS)

Conference

Title13th IAPR International Workshop on Document Analysis Systems, DAS 2018
Duration24 - 27 April 2018
CityVienna
CountryAustria

External IDs

Scopus 85050289070
ORCID /0000-0001-8107-2775/work/142253471

Keywords

Keywords

  • Graph, Rule-based, Spreadsheet, Table Identification, Table Recognition