Logical Structure Recovery in Scholarly Articles with Rich Document Features

Scholarly digital libraries increasingly provide analytics to information within documents themselves. This includes information about the logical document structure of use to downstream components, such as search, navigation, and summarization. In this paper, the authors describe SectLabel, a module that further develops existing software to detect the logical structure of a document from existing PDF files, using the formalism of conditional random fields. While previous work has assumed access only to the raw text representation of the document, a key aspect of this work is to integrate the use of a richer representation of the document that includes features from optical character recognition OCR, such as font size and text position. Experiments reveal that using such rich features improves logical structure detection by a significant 9 F1 points, over a suitable baseline, motivating the use of richer document representations in other digital library applications.