TableSeer: Automatic Table Extraction, Search, and Understanding.
Ying Liu · 2009
1Signatures on file in the Graduate School. iii Tables are ubiquitous with a history that pre-dates that of sentential text. Au-thors often report a summary of their most important findings using tabular structure in documents. For example, scientists widely use tables to present the latest experimental results or statistical data in a condensed fashion. Along with the explosive development of the digital library and internet, tables have become a valuable information source for information seeking and data analysis. Interest in and use of table data necessitates table indexing and search. However, current search engines do not support table search. The difficulty of automatically extracting tables from un-tagged documents, the lack of a universal table metadata specification, and the limitation of the existing ranking schemes make the table search problem challenging. Effectively and efficiently searching table data becomes an urgent demand.