SwissText 2021
For the 6th time, the three-day online conference Swisstext took place from 14-16 June 2021. The conference is the meeting place for text analysis experts from Swiss business and research. It is organized by the association SwissNLP (in cooperation with the two universities FHNW and ZHAW). As regular participants, we were also involved this year with a contribution. The poster “Understanding structural information in scanned documents” shows our approach for analyzing and processing tabular information in scanned documents.
Information extraction from tables
With our HIBU-Plattform, we develop custom solutions in the areas of enterprise search and text analytics. In these projects, we often deal with scanned documents that are digitized using OCR software. Standard extraction methods work well for continuous text but generally deliver insufficient results for tables because they ignore the table layout and thus hide important information / relationships. Typical problem areas are table cells whose content breaks across multiple rows, especially cells whose content can only be interpreted using the associated column heading.
Do you have any questions about the poster or the procedure?. Dr. Holger Keibel will be happy to answer them.
Networking at an online conference? Check!
How can participants at an online conference effectively link up with interesting contacts? That was one of the questions we asked ourselves when offering the organizers of SwissText 2021 our help.
The result was a networking format in which each participant in a session was randomly sent into a virtual room together with three other people. Once there, each person had a limited amount of time for a personal introduction. Before the session automatically ended, participants could exchange contact details if interested.
Of course, such a format cannot replace face-to-face exchange on site. But within the possibilities of an online conference, it worked very well. As the feedback from the participants shows, it was worth taking part:
SwissText 2021 has just ended – and we are already looking forward to next year. Hopefully on-site – but certainly once again with active support from Karakun.
