Scientific Table Type Classification in Digital Library

Abstract

Tables are ubiquitous in digital libraries and on the Web, utilized to satisfy various types of data delivery and document formatting goals. For example, tables are widely used to present experimental results or statistical data in a condensed fashion in scientific documents. Identifying and organizing tables of different types is an absolutely necessary task for better table understanding, and data sharing and reusing. This paper has a three-fold contribution: 1) We propose Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRAD)-based table functional classification for scientific documents; 2) A fine-grained table taxonomy is introduced based on an extensive observation and investigation of tables in digital libraries; and 3) We investigate table characteristics and classify tables automatically based on the defined taxonomy. The preliminary experimental results show that our table taxonomy with salient features can significantly improve scientific table classification performance.