Table Extraction for Information Retrieval

Every year scientific papers and journals publish in different domains (fields) and contain valuable information embedded in tables, which are digitally stored in PDF format. The invaluable data in these documents and publications are crucial in scientific reviews, yet are frequently ignored by search engines. Extracting tabular data by using modern tools and indexing by search engines allows researchers easy usage of the extracted information in various research projects and studies. In this work, we evaluate the known table extraction tools and assess their application to the Information Retrieval field. We have developed a framework that takes the results of the various table extraction tools and compares them with methods in the IR evaluation area.