Thank you very much. I will give a try to those strategies. 

-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected] 
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Peter Murray-Rust
Sent: Thursday 6 November 2014 7:38 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Is sub-heading extraction possible?

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

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