Intelligent document processing

Digital repositories raise the need for an effective and efficient retrieval of the stored material. In this paper, we propose the intensive application of intelligent techniques to the steps of document layout analysis, document image classification and understanding on digital documents. Specifically, the complex interrelation existing among layout components, that are fundamental to assign them the proper semantic role, suggest the exploitation of first-order representations in some learning steps. Results obtained in a prototypical system for scientific conference management prove that the proposed approach can be beneficial both for the layout recognition and for the selection of interesting components of the document, from which extracting the text for categorizing the document according to its topic.