Understanding structured text documents by a model based document analysis system

A document analysis system which is capable of extracting the semantics of specific text portions of structured documents is presented. The architecture of the analysis system is based on a knowledge representation scheme, a semantic network, called Resco-Frame Representation of Structured Documents. It allows the definition of knowledge about document components as well as knowledge about analysis algorithms in a uniform, simple, but powerful representation formalism. Hence, this architecture enables the analysis system to exploit the specific power of both the algorithmic knowledge describing the properties of algorithms and the declarative knowledge about properties of text objects in documents. The inference engine and the control algorithm show how these two knowledge sources are combined and utilized. The flexibility of the representation formalism Fresco, the recognition results and the computational complexity of the inference algorithm are presented in two different applications