Reference String Recognition based on Word Sequence Tagging and Post-processing: Evaluation with English and German Datasets

Reference string recognition is to extract individual reference strings from a reference section of an academic article, which consists of a sequence of reference lines. This task has been attacked by heuristic-based, clustering-based, classification-based approaches, exploiting lexical and layout characteristics of reference lines. Most classification-based methods have used sequence labeling to assign labels to either a sequence of tokens within reference lines, or a sequence of reference lines. Unlike the previous token-level sequence labeling approach, this study attempts to assign different labels to the beginning, intermediate and terminating tokens of a reference string. After that, post-processing is applied to identify reference strings by predicting their beginning and/or terminating tokens. Experimental evaluation using English and German reference string recognition datasets shows that the proposed method obtains above 94% in the macro-averaged F1.