Weak-to-strong annotation alignment for tabular data

Abstract

Systems and processes for aligning weakly-annotated tabular data to recognized characters in a document are provided. Data table annotations are grouped by column and value to produce a plurality of annotation groups. Character recognition tokens are received, and a search algorithm is performed to align the annotation groups to the tokens in a stepwise manner. A base column is designated, after which the search algorithm is performed on the base column annotation groups and the results are used to determine a vertical range of the data table. The search algorithm is then run for the other columns of the data table with the results being limited based on the vertical range. At each step, the annotations in an annotation groups are each aligned to one or more of the tokens. A bounding box is generated for each annotation in the data table and output to a target application.