Automatic searching of tables in digital libraries

Tables are ubiquitous. Unfortunately, no search engine supports table search. In this paper, we propose a novel table specific searching engine, TableSeer, to facilitate the table extracting, indexing, searching, and sharing. In addition, we propose an extensive set of medium-independent metadata to precisely present tables. Given a query, TableSeer ranks the returned results using an innovative ranking algorithm ? TableRank with a tailored vector space model and a novel term weighting scheme. Experimental results show that TableSeer outperforms existing search engines on table search. In addition, incorporating multiple weighting factors can significantly improve the ranking results. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval ? search process General Terms Algorithms, Experimentation, Documentation, Performance, Design Keywords Table search, table crawler, table metadata, table extraction, table indexing, table rankin...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2007
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Ying Liu, Kun Bai, Prasenjit Mitra, C. Lee Giles
• Keywords: Internet Technology, Keywords Table Search, Table Metadata, Table Ranking, WWW 2007