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International Conference on Applications of Natural Language to Information Systems

NLDB 2016: Natural Language Processing and Information Systems pp 162–174Cite as

Disentangling the Structure of Tables in Scientific Literature

Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNISA,volume 9612)

Abstract

Within the scientific literature, tables are commonly used to present factual and statistical information in a compact way, which is easy to digest by readers. The ability to “understand” the structure of tables is key for information extraction in many domains. However, the complexity and variety of presentation layouts and value formats makes it difficult to automatically extract roles and relationships of table cells. In this paper, we present a model that structures tables in a machine readable way and a methodology to automatically disentangle and transform tables into the modelled data structure. The method was tested in the domain of clinical trials: it achieved an F-score of 94.26 % for cell function identification and 94.84 % for identification of inter-cell relationships.

Keywords

  • Table mining
  • Text mining
  • Data management
  • Data modelling
  • Natural language processing

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    http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/.

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Acknowledgments

This research is funded by a doctoral funding grant from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and AstraZeneca Ltd.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Computer Science, University of Manchester, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, M13 9WJ, Manchester, UK

    Nikola Milosevic & Goran Nenadic

  2. AstraZeneca Ltd, Riverside, Granta Park, Cambridge, CB21 6GH, UK

    Cassie Gregson & Robert Hernandez

  3. Health EResearch Centre, Manchester, UK

    Goran Nenadic

Authors
  1. Nikola Milosevic
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  2. Cassie Gregson
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  3. Robert Hernandez
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  4. Goran Nenadic
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Nikola Milosevic .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ConservatoireNational desArts et Métiers, Paris, France

    Elisabeth Métais

  2. University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom

    Farid Meziane

  3. University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom

    Mohamad Saraee

  4. Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan, USA

    Vijayan Sugumaran

  5. University of Salford, Salford, United Kingdom

    Sunil Vadera

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Milosevic, N., Gregson, C., Hernandez, R., Nenadic, G. (2016). Disentangling the Structure of Tables in Scientific Literature. In: Métais, E., Meziane, F., Saraee, M., Sugumaran, V., Vadera, S. (eds) Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. NLDB 2016. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9612. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41754-7_14

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-41754-7_14

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