Understanding table content for mineral exploration reports using deep learning and natural language processing

The geological reports contain various tables, and can offer mineral element content data and stratum detailed information. Geological tabular information extraction and its semantic fusion with text is of great significance in converting and fusing geological unstructured data into structured knowledge to guide cognitive intelligence analysis in the geoscience domain. While the performance of general tools and existing table structure analysis methods is limited due to the various merged cells and diagonally split table headers. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach based on the improved Mask R-CNN model to identify and parse the forms. The geological table parsing network constructed in this paper consists of two key steps: (1) A cell feature augmentation (CFA) module to learn the contextual features for identifying cells of different sizes. (2) A table parsing method (GTab) to parse the table header cells with split lines. We compare the proposed method with commonly used table parsing methods on our constructed geological table dataset. Our models are easily integrated into a prototype system to provide joint information processing and analysis.