Reconstructing the logical structure of a scientific publication using machine learning

Abstract

Semantic enrichment of scientific publications has an increasing impact on scholarly communication. This document describes our contribution to Semantic Publishing Challenge 2016, which aims at investigating novel approaches for improving scholarly publishing through semantic technologies. We participated in Task 2 of this challenge, which requires the extraction of information from the content of a paper given as PDF. The extracted information allows answering queries about the paper’s internal organisation and the context in which it was written. We build upon our contribution to the previous edition of the challenge, where we categorised meta-data, such as authors and affiliations, and extracted funding information. Here we use unsupervised machine learning techniques in order to extend the analysis of the logical structure of the document as to identify section titles and captions of figures and tables. Furthermore, we employ clustering techniques to create the hierarchical table of contents of the article. Our system is modular in nature and allows a separate training of different stages on different training sets.