Style characterization of machine printed texts
Andrew D. Bagdanov · UvA-DARE (University of Amsterdam) · 2004
Chapterr O Prelude eTheyThey all fall there so perfectly, ItIt all seems so well timed.AndAnd here I sit so patiently WaitingWaiting to find out what price YouYou have to pay to get out of GoingGoing through all these things twice. -Bobb Dylan, Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues AgainHowHow are you reading this dissertation?Wee tend to take for granted the amount of prior knowledge we apply to the task off decoding the content of a document.Maybe you were curious about the subject of documentt style characterization.If you are unfamiliar with the subject of document understanding,, perhaps you deliberately sought out the introduction, implicitly aware off the existence of chapters, that their beginning is styled differently. HowHow did you find the introduction?Introductoryy chapters tend to be toward the beginning.Perhaps you found the tablee of contents and the exact page number, or maybe you paged through the book searchingg for pages that look like chapter beginnings.You might have had a mental templatee of beginning-of-chapter pages similar to the scheme annotating this very page.Thesee types of mental templates are learned through experience with a document style, orr genre.The existence of genres of texts establishes implicit rules.Experience with thee rules yields knowledge, allowing you to navigate the structure of books, identify thee purpose of chunks of text, and find information.HowHow did you anticipate that this would be an italicized interrogative?Noww you are reading this sentence.Focus is subconsciously attenuated to the baselinee of these decorated vertical bars of ink.Without having to read anything in thiss paragraph, your attention is drawn to words that are boldfaced, SMALLCAPPED.orr otherwise emphasized.Visual cues attenuate your focus, under the learned prior assumptionn that emphasized text is important.The author is exploiting this by letting stylee coincide with focus.Thiss dissertation examines elements of style in machine printed texts and proposes toolss and techniques to characterize them.