Automatic Document Organization Exploiting FOL Similarity-based Techniques

The organization of a document collection into meaningful groups is a fundamental issue in document management systems. The grouping can be carried out by performing a comparison among the layout structure of the documents. To this aim, a powerful representation language able to describe the relations among all the document components is necessary. First-Order Logic formulae are a powerful representation formalism characterized by the use of relations, that, however, cause serious computational problems due to the phenomenon of indeterminacy. Furthermore, a mechanism to perform the comparison among the resulting descriptions must be provided. This paper proposes the exploitation of a novel similarity formula and evaluation criteria for automatically grouping documents in a collection according to their layout structure. This is done by identifying the description components that are more similar and hence more likely to correspond to each other, based only on their syntactic structure. Experiments on a real-world dataset prove the effectiveness of the proposal.