The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Probabilistic Document Model for Automated Document Composition
Niranjan Damera-Venkata, Jose Bento, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain

ABSTRACT

We present a new paradigm for automated document composition based on a generative, unified probabilistic document model (PDM) that models document composition. The model formally incorporates key design variables such as content pagination, relative arrangement possibilities for page elements and possible page edits. These design choices are modeled jointly as coupled random variables (a Bayesian Network) with uncertainty modeled by their probability distributions. The overall joint probability distribution for the network assigns higher probability to good design choices. Given this model, we show that the general document layout problem can be reduced to probabilistic inference over the Bayesian network. We show that the inference task may be accomplished efficiently, scaling linearly with the content in the best case. We provide a useful specialization of the general model and use it to illustrate the advantages of soft probabilistic encodings over hard one-way constraints in specifying design aesthetics.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Building Table Formatting Tools
Mihai Bilauca, Patrick Healy

Presented by Mihai Bilauca.

ABSTRACT

In this paper we present an overview of the challenges to overcome when developing table authoring tools, including a review of logical table models, typographical issues and automated table layout optimization. We present a Table Drawing Tool prototype which implements an automated solution for the table layout optimization problem for tables with spanning cells using a mathematical modelling method. We report on the performance improvements of this new optimization method compared to previous solutions.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Optimal Automatic Table Layout
Graeme Gange, Kim Marriott, Peter Moulder, Peter Stuckey

Presented by Kim Marriott

ABSTRACT

Automatic layout of tables is useful in word processing applications and is required in on-line applications because of the need to tailor the layout to the viewport width, choice of font and dynamic content. However, if the table contains text, minimizing the height of the table for a fixed maximum width is a difficult combinatorial optimization problem. We present three different approaches to finding the minimum height layout based on standard approaches for combinatorial optimization. All are guaranteed to find the optimal solution. The first is an A*-based approach that uses an admissible heuristic based on the area of the cell content. The second and third are constraint programming (CP) approaches using the same CP model. The second approach uses traditional CP search, while the third approach uses a hybrid CP/SAT approach, lazy clause generation, that uses learning to reduce the search required. We provide a detailed empirical evaluation of the three approaches and also compare them with two mixed integer programming (MIP) encodings due to Bilauca and Healy.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Google+ Internationalization
Luke Swartz and Mark Davis

Day 2 Keynote Address

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

A Generic Calculus of XML Editing Deltas
Presented by Jean-Yves Vion-Dury.

We outlined a mathematical model of the so-called XML editing deltas and proposed a first study of their formal properties. We expected at least three outputs from this theoretical work: a common basis to compare performances of the various algorithms through a structural normalization of deltas, a universal and exible patch application model and a clearer separation of patch and merge engine performance from delta generation performance. This paper presents the full calculus and reports significant progresses with respect to formalizing a normalization procedure. Such method is key to defining an equivalence relation between editing scripts and eventually designing optimizers compiler back-ends, new patch specification languages and execution models.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Timesheets - When SMIL Meets HTML5 and CSS3
Fabien Cazenave, Vincent Quint, Cécile Roisin
Presented by Fabien Cazenave

ABSTRACT

In this paper, we explore different ways to publish multi- media documents on the web. We propose a solution that takes advantage of the new multimedia features of web stan- dards, namely HTML5 and CSS3. While JavaScript is fine for handling timing, synchronization and user interaction in specific multimedia pages, we advocate a more generic, document-oriented alternative relying primarily on declara- tive standards: HTML5 and CSS3 complemented by SMIL Timesheets. This approach is made possible by a Timesheets scheduler that runs in the browser. Various applications based on this solution illustrate the paper, ranging from me- dia annotations to web documentaries.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Component-based Hypervideo Model: High-level Operational Specification of Hypervideos
Madjid Sadallah, Olivier Aubert, Yannick Prié
Presented by Madjid Sadallah.

ABSTRACT

Hypervideo oers enhanced video-centric experiences. Usually dened from a hypermedia perspective, the lack of a dedicated specication hampers hypervideo domain and concepts from being broadly investigated. This article proposes a specialized hypervideo model that addresses hypervideo specicities. Following the principles of component-based modeling and annotation-driven content abstracting, the Component-based Hypervideo Model (CHM) that we propose is a high level representation of hypervideos that intends to provide a general and dedicated hypervideo data model. Considered as a video-centric interactive document, the CHM hypervideo presentation and interaction features are expressed through a high level operational specication. Our annotation-driven approach promotes a clear separation of data from video content and document visualizations. The model serves as a basis for a Web-oriented implementation that provides a declarative syntax and accompanying tools for hypervideo document design in a Web standards compliant manner.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Introduction of a Dynamic Assistance to the Creative Process of Adding Dimensions to Multi-structured Documents
Pierre-Edouard Portier, Sylvie Calabretto
Presented by Pierre-Edouard Portier.

ABSTRACT

We consider documents as the results of dynamic processes of documentary fragments' associations. We have experienced that once a substantial number of associations exist, users need some synoptic views. One possible way of providing such views relies in the organization of associations into relevant subsets that we call "dimensions". Thus, dimensions offer orders along which a documentary archive can be traversed. Many works have proposed efficient ways of presenting combinations of dimensions through graphical user interfaces. Moreover, there are studies on the structural properties of dimensional hypertexts. However, the problem of the origins and evolution of dimensions has not yet received a similar attention. Thus, we propose a mechanism based on a simple structural constraint for helping users in the construction of dimensions: if a cycle appears within a dimension while a user is creating a new dimension by the aggregation of existing ones, he will be encouraged (and assisted in his task) to restructure the dimensions in order to cut the cycle. This is a first step towards a rational control of the emergence and evolution of dimensions.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

An Efficient Language-Independent Method to Extract Content from News Webpages
Eduardo Teixeira Cardoso, Iam Jabour, Eduardo Laber, Rogério Ferreira Rodrigues, Pedro Lazéra Cardoso
Presented by Eduardo Teixeira Cardoso.

ABSTRACT

We tackle the task of news webpage segmentation, specifically identifying the news title, publication date and story body. While there are very good results in the literature, most of them rely on webpage rendering, which is a very time-consuming step. We focus on scenarios with a high volume of documents, where performance is a must. The chosen approach extends our previous work in the area, combining structural properties with hints of visual presentation styles, computed with a quicker method than regular rendering, and machine learning algorithms. In our experiments, we took special attention to some aspects that are often overlooked in the literature, such as processing time and the generalization of the extraction results for unseen domains. Our approach has shown to be about an order of magnitude faster than an equivalent full rendering alternative while retaining a good quality of extraction.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Interoperable Metadata Semantics with Meta-Metadata: A Use Case Integrating Search Engines

Yin Qu, Andruid Kerne, Andrew M. Webb, Aaron Herstein
Presented by Yin Qu.

ABSTRACT

A use case involving integrating results from search engines illustrates how the meta-metadata language facilitates interoperable metadata semantics. Formal semantics can be hard to obtain directly. For example, search engines may only present results through web pages; even if they do provide web services, they don't provide them according to a mutually interoperable standard. We show how to use the open source meta-metadata language to define a common base class for search results, and how to extend the base class to create polymorphic variants that include engine-specific fields. We develop wrappers to extract data from HTML search results from engines including Google, Bing, Delicious, and Slashdot. We write a short meta-search program for integrating the search results, reranking them, and providing formatted HTML output. This provides an extensible formal and functional semantics for search. Meta-metadata also directly enables representing the same integrated search results as XML or JSON. This research can profoundly transform the derivation and representation of interoperable metadata semantics from a multitude of heterogeneous wild web sources.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

A Study of the Interaction of Paper Substrates on Printed Forensic Imaging
Guy Adams, Stephen Pollard, Steven Simske
Presented by Stephen Pollard.

ABSTRACT

At the microscopic level, printing on a substrate exhibits imperfections that can be used as a unique identifier for labels, documents and other printed items. In previous work, we have demonstrated using these minute imperfections around a simple forensic mark such as a single printed character for robust authentication of the character with a low cost (and mobile) system. This approach allows for product authentication even when there is only minimal printing (e.g. on a small label or medallion), supporting a variety of secure document workflows. In this paper, we present an investigation on the influence that the substrate type has on the imperfections of the printing process that are used to derive the character 'signature'. We also make a comparison between two printing processes, dry electro photographic process (laser) and (thermal) inkjet. Understanding the sensitivity of our methods to these factors is important so that we know the limitations of the approach for document forensics.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Expressing Conditions in Tailored Brochures for Public Administration
Nathalie Colineau, Cecile Paris, Keith Vander Linden
Presented by Keith Vander Linden.

ABSTRACT

Citizen-focused documents in Public Administration devote considerable effort to the expression of conditions. These conditions are commonly expressed as statements of eligibility requirements for the programs being described, but they manifest themselves in other places as well, such as in feedback to readers in tailored informational brochures and as input fields on program application forms. This paper discusses how administrative conditions can be represented in a manner that supports both the eligibility reasoning required for the generation of citizen-tailored documents and also the automated generation of condition expressions in a variety of forms. The presentation pays particular attention to the question of how a generation mechanism can allow authors to override the default forms of automated expression when necessary. The discussion is based on a prototype tailored delivery application whose knowledge base is implemented in OWL DL and whose output is constructed using Myriad, a platform for tailored document planning and formatting. This work is the result of a collaboration between CSIRO, Centrelink, the Australian service delivery organization for health and human services, and Calvin College.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

A Versatile Model for Web Page Representation, Information Extraction and Content Re-Packaging
Bernhard Krüpl-Sypien, Ruslan Fayzrakhmanov, Wolfgang Holzinger, Mathias Panzenböck, Robert Baumgartner
Presented by Bernhard Krüpl-Sypien.

ABSTRACT

On todays Web, designers take huge efforts to create visu- ally rich websites that boast a magnitude of interactive ele- ments. Contrarily, most web information extraction (WIE) algorithms are still based on attributed tree methods which struggle to deal with this complexity. In this paper, we in- troduce a versatile model to represent web documents. The model is based on gestalt theory principlestrying to cap- ture the most important aspects in a formally exact way. It (i) represents and unifies access to visual layout, content and functional aspects; (ii) is implemented with semantic web techniques that can be leveraged for i.e. automatic reason- ing. Considering the visual appearance of a web page, we view it as a collection of gestalt figuresbased on gestalt primitiveseach representing a specific design pattern, be it navigation menus or news articles. Based on this model, we introduce our WIE methodology, a re-engineering pro- cess involving design patterns, statistical distributions and text content properties. The complete framework consists of the UOM model, which formalizes the mentioned com- ponents, and the MANM layer that hints on structure and serialization, providing document re-packaging foundations. Finally, we discuss how we have applied and evaluated our model in the area of web accessibility.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Document Visual Similarity Measure For Document Search
Ildus Ahmadullin, Jan Allebach, Niranjan Damera-Venkata, Jian Fan, Seungyon Lee, Qian Lin, Jerry Liu, Eamonn O'Brien-Strain
Presented by Ildus Ahmadullin

ABSTRACT

Managing large document databases has become an important task. Being able to automatically compare document layouts and classify and search documents with respect to their visual appearance proves to be desirable in many applications. We propose a new algorithm that approximates a metric function between documents based on their visual similarity. The comparison is based only on the visual appearance of the document without taking into consideration its text content. We measure the similarity of single page documents with respect to distance functions between three document components: background, text, and saliency. Each document component is represented as a Gaussian mixture distribution; and distances between the components of different documents are calculated as an approximation of the Hellinger distance between corresponding distributions. Since the Hellinger distance obeys the triangle inequality, it proves to be favorable in the task of nearest neighbor search in a document database. Thus, the computation required to find similar documents in a document database can be significantly reduced.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

Paginate Dynamic and Web Content
Presented by Fabio Giannetti

ABSTRACT

Highly customized and content driven documents present substantial challenges in producing sophisticated layout. In fact, these are apps that usually look like well-designed documents. A concrete example is e-books. E-books have re-flowing requirements to allow the user to read them on a plethora of devices as wells as change the font size and font style. Meanwhile this increases the flexibility of the medium, it loses common features found in books like footnotes, marginalia (a.k.a. side notes), pull-quotes and, floats. The proposed solution has the aim of providing an easy and flexible, yet powerful, way to express complex layout for highly dynamic and re-flowing content. To serve this purpose, a role based mapper has been introduced linking both flow and out-of-flow content.

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The 11th ACM Symposium on Document Engineering
Mountain View, California, USA
September 19-22, 2011

A Framework with Tools for Designing Web-based Geographic Applications
The Nhan Luong, Sébastien Laborie, Thierry Nodenot

Presented by The Nhan Luong.

ABSTRACT

Many Web-based geographic applications have been developed in various domains, such as tourism, education, surveillance and military. However, developing such applications is a cumbersome task because it necessitates several types of components (e.g., maps, contents, indexation services, databases) that have to be assembled together. Hence, developers have to deal with different technologies and application behavior models. In order to create Web-based geographic applications and overcome design problems, we propose a framework composed of three complementary tasks: identifying some desired data, building the graphical layout organization and defining potential user interactions. According to this framework, we have specified a unified model and we have encoded it using Semantic Web technologies, such as RDF. Through a prototype named WINDMash, we have implemented some tools that instantiate our model and automatically generate concrete Internet geographic applications that can be executed into Web browsers.

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