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The interpretation of tables in texts

This thesis looks at the issues relating to the development of technology capable of processing tables as they appear in textual documents so that their contents may be accessed and further interpreted by standard information extraction and natural language processing systems. The thesis offers a formal description of the table and the description and evaluation of a system which provides instances of that model for table examples. There are three parts to the thesis. The first looks at tables in general terms, suggests where their complexities are to be found, and reviews the literature dealing with research into tables in other fields. The second part introduces a layered model of the table and provides some notational equipment for encoding tables in these component layers. The final part discusses the design, implementation and evaluation of a system which produces an instance of the model for the tables found in a document. It also discusses the design and collection of a corpus of tables used for the training and evaluation of the system. The thesis catalogues a laxge number of phenomena discovered in the corpus collected during the research and provides appropriate terminology.