Conditional Random Fields (CRF) are popular methods for labeling unstructured or textual data. Like many machine learning approaches, these undirected graphical models assume the instances to be independently distributed. However, in real-world applications data is grouped in a natural way, e.g., by its creation context. The instances in each group often share additional structural consistencies. This paper proposes a domain-independent method for exploiting these consistencies by combining two CRFs in a stacked learning framework. We apply rule learning collectively on the predictions of an initial CRF for one context to acquire descriptions of its specific properties. Then, we utilize these descriptions as dynamic and high quality features in an additional (stacked) CRF. The presented approach is evaluated with a real-world dataset for the segmentation of references and achieves a significant reduction of the labeling error.

Conditional Random Fields CRF are popular methods for labeling unstructured or textual data. Like many machine learning approaches these undirected graphical models assume the instances to be independently distributed. However, in real world applications data is grouped in a natural way, e.g., by its creation context. The instances in each group often share additional structural consistencies. This paper proposes a domain-independent method for exploiting these consistencies by combining two CRFs in a stacked learning framework. The approach incorporates three successive steps of inference: First, an initial CRF processes single instances as usual. Next, we apply rule learning collectively on all labeled outputs of one context to acquire descriptions of its specific properties. Finally, we utilize these descriptions as dynamic and high quality features in an additional stacked CRF. The presented approach is evaluated with a real-world dataset for the segmentation of references and achieves a significant reduction of the labeling error.

The accurate extraction of scholarly reference information from scientific publications is essential for many useful applications like BibTeX management systems or citation analysis. Automatic extraction methods suffer from the heterogeneity of reference notation, no matter wether the extraction model was handcrafted or learnt from labeled data. However, references of the same paper or journal are usually homogeneous. We exploit this local consistency with a novel approach. Given some initial information from such a reference section, we try to derived generalized patterns. These patterns are used to create a local model of the current document. The local model helps to identify errors and to improve the extracted information incrementally during the extraction process. Our approach is implemented with handcrafted transformation rules working on a meta-level being able to correct the information independent of the applied layout style. The experimental results compete very well with the state of the art methods and show an extremely high performance on consistent reference sections.

The accurate extraction of bibliographic information from scientific publications is an active field of research. Machine learning and sequence labeling approaches like Conditional Random Fields (CRF) are often applied for this reference extraction task, but still suffer from the ambiguity of reference notation. Reference sections apply a predefined style guide and contain only homogeneous references. Therefore, other references of the same paper or journal often provide evidence how the fields of a reference are correctly labeled. We propose a novel approach that exploits the similarities within a document. Our process model uses information of unlabeled documents directly during the extraction task in order to automatically adapt to the perceived style guide. This is implemented by changing the manifestation of the features for the applied CRF. The experimental results show considerable improvements compared to the common approach. We achieve an average F1 score of 96.7% and an instance accuracy of 85.4% on the test data set.