Table understanding is a well studied problem in document analysis, and many academic and commercial approaches have been developed to recognize tables in several document formats, including plain text, scanned page images and born-digital, object-based formats such as PDF. Despite the abundance of these techniques, an objective comparison of their performance is still missing. The Table Competition held in the context of ICDAR 2013 is our first attempt at objectively evaluating these techniques against each other in a standardized way, across several input formats. The competition independently addresses three problems: (i) table location, (ii) table structure recognition, and (iii) these two tasks combined. We received results from seven academic systems, which we have also compared against four commercial products. This paper presents our findings.

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In this research we introduce the ABBA 1 framework for the generation of advanced screen readers. Current solutions do not enable blind users to participate in the Web in a satisfactory way because they are not time-efficient, cumbersome to use, and do not provide enough overview and orientation within a document. Also, they hide away important layout information from the user. Our approach overcomes these limitations by unifying different semantic views of a document into one multi-axial model and making them accessible to the user in an intuitive interface. The benefit to the user is a higher level of control in different navigation scenarios.

Fast technological advancements and little compliance with accessibility standards by Web page authors pose serious obstacles to the Web experience of the blind user. We propose a unified Web document model that enables us to create a richer browsing experience and improved navigability for blind users. The model provides an integrated view on all aspects of a Web page and is leveraged to create a multiaxial user interface.

Sentic computing relies on well-defined affective models of different complexity—polarity to distinguish positive and negative sentiment, for example, or more nuanced models to capture expressions of human emotions. When used to measure communication success, even the most granular affective model combined with sophisticated machine learning approaches may not fully capture an organisation’s strategic positioning goals. Such goals often deviate from the assumptions of standardised affective models. While certain emotions such as Joy and Trust typically represent desirable brand associations, specific communication goals formulated by marketing professionals often go beyond such standard dimensions. For instance, the brand manager of a television show may consider fear or sadness to be desired emotions for its audience. This article introduces expansion techniques for affective models, combining common and commonsense knowledge available in knowledge graphs with language models and affective reasoning, improving coverage and consistency as well as supporting domain-specific interpretations of emotions. An extensive evaluation compares the performance of different expansion techniques: (i) a quantitative evaluation based on the revisited Hourglass of Emotions model to assess performance on complex models that cover multiple affective categories, using manually compiled gold standard data, and (ii) a qualitative evaluation of a domain-specific affective model for television programme brands. The results of these evaluations demonstrate that the introduced techniques support a variety of embeddings and pre-trained models. The paper concludes with a discussion on applying this approach to other scenarios where affective model resources are scarce.