A Genetic-Based Search for Adaptive Table Recognition in Spreadsheets

Spreadsheets are very successful content generation tools, used in almost every enterprise to create a wealth of information. However, this information is often intermingled with various formatting, layout, and textual metadata, making it hard to identify and interpret the tabular payload. Previous works proposed to solve this problem by mainly using heuristics. Although fast to implement, these approaches fail to capture the high variability of user-generated spreadsheet tables. Therefore, in this paper, we propose a supervised approach that is able to adapt to arbitrary spreadsheet datasets. We use a graph model to represent the contents of a sheet, which carries layout and spatial features. Subsequently, we apply genetic-based approaches for graph partitioning, to recognize the parts of the graph corresponding to tables in the sheet. The search for tables is guided by an objective function, which is tuned to match the specific characteristics of a given dataset. We present the feasibility of this approach with an experimental evaluation, on a large, real-world spreadsheet corpus.