SALT: a semantic approach for generating document representations

• Authors: Tudor Groza;Alexander Schutz;Siegfried Handschuh
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2007 ACM symposium on Document engineering
• Year: 2007

The structure of a document has an important influence on the perception of its content. Considering scientific publications, we can affirm that by making use of the ordinary linear layout, a well organized publication, following a "red wire", will always be better understood and analyzed than one having a poor or chaotic structure, but not necessarily poor content. Reading a publication in a linear way, from the first page to the last page means a lot of unnecessary information processing to the reader. Looking at a publication from another perspective by accessing the key-points or argumentative structure directly can give better insights into the author's thoughts, and for certain tasks (i.e. getting a first impression of an article) a representation of the document reduced to its core could be more important than its linear structure. In this paper, we will show how one can build different representations of the same document, by exploiting the semantics captured in the text. The focus will be on scientific publications and as building foundation we use the SALT (Semantically Annotated LATEX) annotation framework for creating Semantic PDF Documents.