Year: 1999
Type: article
Abstract: The signature block is a common structured component found in email messages. Accurate identification and analysis of signature blocks is important in many multimedia messaging and information retrieval applications such as email text-to-speech rendering, automatic construction of personal address databases, and interactive message retrieval. It is also a very challenging task, because signature blocks often appear in complex two-dimensional layouts which are guided only by loose conventions. Traditional text analysis methods designed to deal with sequential text cannot handle two-dimensional structures, while the highly unconstrained nature of signature blocks makes the application of two-dimensional grammars very difficult. In this article, we describe an algorithm for signature block analysis which combines two-dimensional structural segmentation with one-dimensional grammatical constraints. The information obtained from both layout and linguistic analysis is integrated in the form of weighted finite-state transducers. The algorithm is currently implemented as a component in a preprocessing system for email text-to-speech rendering.
Authors: Hao Chen, Jianying Hu, Richard W. Sproat
Institutions: University of California, Berkeley, AT&T (United States)
Language: English
Subfield: Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2089777159