The availability of automated approaches and tools to extract structured textual content from PDF articles is essential to enable scientific text mining. This paper describes and evaluates the PDFdigest tool, a PDF-to-XML textual content extraction system specially designed to extract scientific articles' headings and logical structure (title, authors, abstract,...) and its textual content. The extractor deals with both text-based and image-based PDF articles using custom rule-based algorithms based on existing state-of-the-art open-source tools for both PDF-to-HTML conversion and image-based PDF Optical Character Recognition.
@InProceedings{FERRÉS18.1009, author = {Daniel Ferrés and Horacio Saggion and Francesco Ronzano and Àlex Bravo}, title = "{PDFdigest: an Adaptable Layout-Aware PDF-to-XML Textual Content Extractor for Scientific Articles}", booktitle = {Proceedings of the Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2018)}, year = {2018}, month = {May 7-12, 2018}, address = {Miyazaki, Japan}, editor = {Nicoletta Calzolari (Conference chair) and Khalid Choukri and Christopher Cieri and Thierry Declerck and Sara Goggi and Koiti Hasida and Hitoshi Isahara and Bente Maegaard and Joseph Mariani and Hélène Mazo and Asuncion Moreno and Jan Odijk and Stelios Piperidis and Takenobu Tokunaga}, publisher = {European Language Resources Association (ELRA)}, isbn = {979-10-95546-00-9}, language = {english} }
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