2020-06-07: Regular Expression — A Powerful Tool to Parse Text with Visually Identifiable Patterns
In the previous blog , I have discussed how tesseract-OCR performed on scanned Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). If you have read my earlier blog , we already saw that the process started with converting the cover page of scanned ETDs into images. Then, tesseract-OCR was applied and saved the extracted result into text files. We also saw that OpenCV OCR failed on scanned ETDs. We could try a widely used open-source tool such as GROBID , designed for scholarly papers. However , this article shows that GROBID is intended for extracting bibliographic metadata for born-digital academic papers. Finally, we decided to apply tesseract-OCR to extract the text from the cover page of scanned ETDs. Afterward, a series of regular expressions (RegEx) was performed to extract seven metadata fields, including titles, authors, academic-programs, institutions, advisors, and years. In this blog, I will introduce how RegEx can be a powerful tool to quickly p...