Greetings, In general there is NO automatic way - it depends on how the paper was produced and what semantics are used. Note that PDFs do NOT contain words, sentences, paragraphs, sections - only characters (and sometimes only pixels)
We have been working on this for 3 years using PDFBox and adding code on top (see http://bitbucket.org/petermr/pdf2svg and related projects). There are two main steps: * break the paper into sections. The best strategy is usually to use horizontal whitespace coupled with the typography of the section headings. With most publishers this is possible, but some use special boxes. Note that the strategy will depend on whether the language is ISOLatin (i.e. L2R, Top2Bottom) or other. * identify the role of the sections. In general you have to know the language of the paper - we only do ones in English at present. We are working with the European Bioinfromatics Institute who have a mapping of phrases onto common concepts (e.g. Introduction could be "Introduction", "Background", etc.). This may only hold for biosciences. There are many complications which can make it more difficult... Follow us at http://contentmine.org where we are starting to do this on a large scale (starting with XML, but moving to PDF later). P. On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 4:56 PM, Mehmet Ali Abdulhayoglu < [email protected]> wrote: > Hi all, > > When a text extraction is tried from a scientific paper in pdf format, is > it possible to detect > Headings and sub-headings? More specifically, is it possible to extract > only introduction > Part or conclusion part? > > Thanks in advance. > > Best, > Mehmet > -- Peter Murray-Rust Reader in Molecular Informatics Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry University of Cambridge CB2 1EW, UK +44-1223-763069
