Table extraction

Table extraction is the process of recognizing and separating a table from a large document, possibly also
recognizing individual rows, columns or elements. It may be regarded as a special form of information
extraction.

Table extractions from webpages can take advantage of the special HTML elements that exist for tables,
e.g., the "table" tag, and programming libraries may implement table extraction from webpages. The
Python pandas software library can extract tables from HTML webpages via its read_html() function.

More challenging is table extraction from PDFs or scanned images, where there usually is no table-specific
machine readable markup.[1] Systems that extract data from tables in scientific PDFs have been
described.[2][3]

Wikipedia presents some of its information in tables, and, e.g., 3.5 million tables can be extracted from the
English Wikipedia.[4] Some of the tables have a specific format, e.g., the so-called infoboxes. Large-scale
table extraction of Wikipedia infoboxes forms one of the sources for DBpedia.[5]

Commercial web services for table extraction exist, e.g., Amazon Textract, Google's Document AI, IBM
Watson Discovery, and Microsoft Form Recognizer.[1] Open source tools also exist, e.g., PDFFigures 2.0
that has been used in Semantic Scholar.[6] In a comparison published in 2017, the researchers found the
proprietary program ABBYY FineReader to yield the best PDF table extraction performance among six
different tools evaluated.[7]

References
1. Douglas Burdick; Marina Danilevsky; Alexandre V Evfimievski; Yannis Katsis; Nancy Wang
(August 2020). "Table extraction and understanding for scientific and enterprise
applications". Proceedings of the VLDB Endowment. International Conference on Very
Large Data Bases. 13 (12): 3433–3436. doi:10.14778/3415478.3415563 (https://doi.org/10.1
4778%2F3415478.3415563). ISSN 2150-8097 (https://www.worldcat.org/issn/2150-8097).
Wikidata Q108170445.
2. Wenhao Yu; Wei Peng; Yu Shu; Qingkai Zeng; Meng Jiang (19 April 2020). Experimental
Evidence Extraction System in Data Science with Hybrid Table Features and Ensemble
Learning (https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3366423.3380174). Proceedings of The Web
Conference 2020. pp. 951–961. doi:10.1145/3366423.3380174 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F
3366423.3380174). ISBN 978-1-4503-7023-3. Wikidata Q108172460.
3. Benno Kruit; Hongyu He; Jacopo Urbani (1 November 2020). Tab2Know: Building a
Knowledge Base from Tables in Scientific Papers. The Semantic Web – ISWC 2020: 19th
International Semantic Web Conference, Athens, Greece, November 2–6, 2020,
Proceedings, Part I. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. pp. 349–365. arXiv:2107.13306 (ht
tps://arxiv.org/abs/2107.13306). doi:10.1007/978-3-030-62419-4_20 (https://doi.org/10.100
7%2F978-3-030-62419-4_20). ISBN 978-3-030-62419-4. Wikidata Q101086651.
4. Tobias Bleifuß; Leon Bornemann; Dmitri V. Kalashnikov; Felix Naumann; Divesh Srivastava
(17 August 2021). "The Secret Life of Wikipedia Tables" (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2929/paper4.
pdf) (PDF). Proceedings of the 2nd Workshop on Search, Exploration, and Analysis in
Heterogeneous Datastores. CEUR Workshop Proceedings: 20–26. Wikidata Q108215401.
 5. Sören Auer; Christian Bizer; Georgi Kobilarov; Jens Lehmann; Richard Cyganiak; Zachary
Ives (2007). DBpedia: A Nucleus for a Web of Open Data. The Semantic Web: 6th
International Semantic Web Conference, 2nd Asian Semantic Web Conference, ISWC 2007
+ ASWC 2007, Busan, Korea, November 11-15, 2007. Proceedings. Lecture Notes in
Computer Science. pp. 722–735. doi:10.1007/978-3-540-76298-0_52 (https://doi.org/10.100
7%2F978-3-540-76298-0_52). ISBN 978-3-540-76297-3. Wikidata Q27910422.
6. Christopher Clark; Santosh Divvala (2016). PDFFigures 2.0: Mining figures from research
papers (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7559577). Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE-
CS on Joint Conference on Digital Libraries - JCDL '16. ISBN 978-1-4503-4229-2.
Wikidata Q108172042.
7. Andreiwid Sheffer Corrêa; Pär-Ola Zander (7 June 2017), Unleashing Tabular Content to
Open Data: A Survey on PDF Table Extraction Methods and Tools (https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.
1145/3085228.3085278), doi:10.1145/3085228.3085278 (https://doi.org/10.1145%2F30852
28.3085278), Wikidata Q108173686

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Table_extraction&oldid=1129486752"