Semantic Document Layout Analysis of Handwritten Manuscripts

A document layout can be more informative than merely a document’s visual and structural appearance.Thus,document layout analysis(DLA)is considered a necessary prerequisite for advanced processing and detailed document image analysis to be further used in several applications and different objectives.This research extends the traditional approaches of DLA and introduces the concept of semantic document layout analysis(SDLA)by proposing a novel framework for semantic layout analysis and characterization of handwritten manuscripts.The proposed SDLA approach enables the derivation of implicit information and semantic characteristics,which can be effectively utilized in dozens of practical applications for various purposes,in a way bridging the semantic gap and providingmore understandable high-level document image analysis and more invariant characterization via absolute and relative labeling.This approach is validated and evaluated on a large dataset ofArabic handwrittenmanuscripts comprising complex layouts.The experimental work shows promising results in terms of accurate and effective semantic characteristic-based clustering and retrieval of handwritten manuscripts.It also indicates the expected efficacy of using the capabilities of the proposed approach in automating and facilitating many functional,reallife tasks such as effort estimation and pricing of transcription or typing of such complex manuscripts.

Measuring Similarity of Academic Articles with Semantic Profile and Joint Word Embedding

Long-document semantic measurement has great significance in many applications such as semantic searchs, plagiarism detection, and automatic technical surveys. However, research efforts have mainly focused on the semantic similarity of short texts. Document-level semantic measurement remains an open issue due to problems such as the omission of background knowledge and topic transition. In this paper, we propose a novel semantic matching method for long documents in the academic domain. To accurately represent the general meaning of an academic article, we construct a semantic profile in which key semantic elements such as the research purpose, methodology, and domain are included and enriched. As such, we can obtain the overall semantic similarity of two papers by computing the distance between their profiles. The distances between the concepts of two different semantic profiles are measured by word vectors. To improve the semantic representation quality of word vectors, we propose a joint word-embedding model for incorporating a domain-specific semantic relation constraint into the traditional context constraint. Our experimental results demonstrate that, in the measurement of document semantic similarity, our approach achieves substantial improvement over state-of-the-art methods, and our joint word-embedding model produces significantly better word representations than traditional word-embedding models.