Towards high-quality text stream extraction from PDF: technical background to the ACL 2012 contributed task

  • Authors:
  • Øyvind Raddum Berg;Stephan Oepen;Jonathon Read

  • Affiliations:
  • Universitetet i Oslo;Universitetet i Oslo;Universitetet i Oslo

  • Venue:
  • ACL '12 Proceedings of the ACL-2012 Special Workshop on Rediscovering 50 Years of Discoveries
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Extracting textual content and document structure from PDF presents a surprisingly (depressingly, to some, in fact) difficult challenge, owing to the purely display-oriented design of the PDF document standard. While a variety of lower-level PDF extraction toolkits exist, none fully support the recovery of original text (in reading order) and relevant structural elements, even for so-called borndigital PDFs, i.e. those prepared electronically using typesetting systems like LATEX, OpenOffice, and the like. This short paper summarizes a new tool for high-quality extraction of text and structure from PDFs, combining state-of-the-art PDF parsing, font interpretation, layout analysis, and TEI-compliant output of text and logical document markup.