{"id":741232,"date":"2021-04-19T23:03:14","date_gmt":"2021-04-20T06:03:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/?post_type=msr-research-item&#038;p=741232"},"modified":"2021-07-01T20:49:01","modified_gmt":"2021-07-02T03:49:01","slug":"semantic-table-structure-identification-in-spreadsheets","status":"publish","type":"msr-research-item","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/publication\/semantic-table-structure-identification-in-spreadsheets\/","title":{"rendered":"Semantic Table Structure Identification in Spreadsheets"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"paperinfo-c\">\n<div class=\"paperinfo-i paperinfo-i-expand\">\n<div class=\"paperinfo-abstract\">\n<div class=\"pg\">\n<div class=\"pavb abstract format1\" data-format=\"1\">\n<div class=\"rm rml\">\n<p>Spreadsheets are widely used in various business tasks, and contain amounts of valuable data. However, spreadsheet tables are usually organized in a semi-structured way, and contain complicated semantic structures, e.g., header types and relations among headers. Lack of documented semantic table structures, existing data analysis and error detection tools can hardly understand spreadsheet tables. Thus, identifying semantic table structures in spreadsheet tables can greatly promote various analysis tasks on spreadsheets.<\/p>\n<p>In this paper, we propose\u00a0<em>Tasi<\/em>\u00a0(<em>Ta<\/em>ble\u00a0<em>s<\/em>tructure\u00a0<em>i<\/em>dentification) to automatically identify semantic table structures in spreadsheets. Based on the contents, styles, and spatial locations in table headers, Tasi adopts a multi-classifier to predict potential header types and relations, and then integrates all header types and relations into consistent semantic table structures. We further propose TasiError, to detect spreadsheet errors based on the identified semantic table structures by Tasi. Our experiments on real-world spreadsheets show that, Tasi can precisely identify semantic table structures in spreadsheets, and TasiError can detect real-world spreadsheet errors with higher precision (75.2%) and recall (82.9%) than existing approaches.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<div class=\"paperinfo-c\">\n<div class=\"paperinfo-i\">\n<div class=\"pg\">\n<div class=\"pavb\"><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Spreadsheets are widely used in various business tasks, and contain amounts of valuable data. However, spreadsheet tables are usually organized in a semi-structured way, and contain complicated semantic structures, e.g., header types and relations among headers. Lack of documented semantic table structures, existing data analysis and error detection tools can hardly understand spreadsheet tables. Thus, [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","footnotes":""},"msr-content-type":[3],"msr-research-highlight":[],"research-area":[13556,13560],"msr-publication-type":[193716],"msr-product-type":[],"msr-focus-area":[],"msr-platform":[],"msr-download-source":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-field-of-study":[],"msr-conference":[],"msr-journal":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"class_list":["post-741232","msr-research-item","type-msr-research-item","status-publish","hentry","msr-research-area-artificial-intelligence","msr-research-area-programming-languages-software-engineering","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_publishername":"","msr_edition":"","msr_affiliation":"","msr_published_date":"2021-7-1","msr_host":"","msr_duration":"","msr_version":"","msr_speaker":"","msr_other_contributors":"","msr_booktitle":"","msr_pages_string":"","msr_chapter":"","msr_isbn":"","msr_journal":"","msr_volume":"","msr_number":"","msr_editors":"","msr_series":"","msr_issue":"","msr_organization":"","msr_how_published":"","msr_notes":"","msr_highlight_text":"","msr_release_tracker_id":"","msr_original_fields_of_study":"","msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_longbiography":"","msr_microsoftintellectualproperty":1,"msr_main_download":"","msr_publicationurl":"","msr_doi":"","msr_publication_uploader":[{"type":"file","viewUrl":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/uploads\/prod\/2020\/08\/Semantic-Table-Structure-Identification-in-Spreadsheets.pdf","id":"757627","title":"semantic-table-structure-identification-in-spreadsheets-2","label_id":"243103","label":0}],"msr_related_uploader":"","msr_attachments":[],"msr-author-ordering":[{"type":"text","value":"Yakun Zhang","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Xiao Lv","user_id":37122,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Xiao Lv"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Haoyu Dong","user_id":37128,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Haoyu Dong"},{"type":"text","value":"Wensheng Dou","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Shi Han","user_id":33618,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Shi Han"},{"type":"user_nicename","value":"Dongmei Zhang","user_id":31665,"rest_url":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/microsoft-research\/v1\/researchers?person=Dongmei Zhang"},{"type":"text","value":"Jun Wei","user_id":0,"rest_url":false},{"type":"text","value":"Ye Dan","user_id":0,"rest_url":false}],"msr_impact_theme":[],"msr_research_lab":[199560],"msr_event":[],"msr_group":[144847],"msr_project":[558663],"publication":[],"video":[],"download":[],"msr_publication_type":"inproceedings","related_content":{"projects":[{"ID":558663,"post_title":"Spreadsheet Intelligence","post_name":"spreadsheet-intelligence","post_type":"msr-project","post_date":"2019-01-06 17:18:03","post_modified":"2022-04-24 01:24:49","post_status":"publish","permalink":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/project\/spreadsheet-intelligence\/","post_excerpt":"At Microsoft Research Asia, this is the umbrella research project behind Ideas in Excel of Microsoft Office 365 product.\u00a0With successful technology transfers via close collaboration with Excel teams,\u00a0this intelligent\u00a0feature has been announced at Microsoft Ignite 2019 Conference and released with General Availability on March 1, 2019. There are following sub- or related research projects on some fundamental technology pillars, respectively. They jointly enable such one-click intelligence of Ideas in Excel. TableSense: table range detection\u00a0and table&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-project\/558663"}]}}]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/741232"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-research-item"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/741232\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":741235,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-item\/741232\/revisions\/741235"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=741232"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-content-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-content-type?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-highlight","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-highlight?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-publication-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-publication-type?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-product-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-product-type?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-focus-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-focus-area?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-platform","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-platform?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-download-source","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-download-source?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-field-of-study","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-field-of-study?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-conference","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-conference?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-journal","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-journal?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=741232"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=741232"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}