Document structure identifier
OwnerDavid N. Slocombeinventor
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A method of automated document structure identification based on visual cues is disclosed herein. The two dimensional layout of the document is analyzed to discern visual cues related to the structure of the document, and the text of the document is tokenized so that similarly structured elements are treated similarly. The method can be applied in the generation of extensible mark-up language files, natural language parsing and search engine ranking mechanisms.
Claims13
A method of creating a document structure model of a computer parsable document having contents on at least one page, the method comprising:
- identifying the contents of the document as segments having defined characteristics and representing structure in the document;
- creating tokens to characterize the content and structure of the document, each token associated with one of the at least one pages based on the position of each segment in relation to other segments on the same page, each token having characteristics defining a structure in the document determined in accordance with the structure of the page associated with the token;
- and
- creating the document structure model in accordance with the characteristics of the tokens across all of the at least one pages of the document.
A system for creating a document structure model of a computer parsable document having contents on at least one page, the system comprising:
- a visual data acquirer for identifying the contents of the document as segments representing structure in the document and having defined characteristics;
- a visual tokenizer, connected to the visual data acquirer for receiving the identified segments and for creating tokens to characterize the content and structure of the document, each token associated with one of the at least one pages based on the position of each segment in relation to other segments on the same page, each token having characteristics defining a structure in the document determined in accordance with the structure of the page associated with the token;
- and
- a document structure identifier for creating the document structure model in accordance with the characteristics of the tokens received from the visual tokenizer.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.