Table Header Correction Algorithm Based on Heuristics for Improving Spreadsheet Data Extraction

A spreadsheet is one of the most commonly used forms of representation for datasets of similar type. Spreadsheets provide considerable flexibility for data structure organisation. As a result of this flexibility, tables with very complex data structures could be created. In turn, such complexity makes automatic table processing and data extraction a challenging task. Therefore, table preproccessing step is often required in the data extraction pipeline. This paper proposes a heuristic algorithm for the correction of a table header in a spreadsheet. The aim of the proposed algorithm is to transform a machine-readable structure of the table header into its visual representation. The algorithm achieves this aim by iterating through table header cells and merging some of them according to proposed heuristics. The transformed structure, in turn, allows to improve quality of spreadsheet understanding and data extraction further in the pipeline. The proposed algorithm was implemented in the TabbyXL toolset.