A Pipeline for Analysing Grant Applications

Data mining techniques can transform massive amounts of unstructured data into quantitative data that quickly reveal insights, trends, and patterns behind the original data. In this paper, a data mining model is applied to analyse the 2019 grant applications submitted to an Australian Government research funding agency to investigate whether grant schemes successfully identifies innovative project proposals, as intended. The grant applications are peer-reviewed research proposals that include specific ``innovation and creativity'' (IC) scores assigned by reviewers. In addition to predicting the IC score for each research proposal, we are particularly interested in understanding the vocabulary of innovative proposals. In order to solve this problem, various data mining models and feature encoding algorithms are studied and explored. As a result, we propose a model with the best performance, a Random Forest (RF) classifier over documents encoded with features denoting the presence or absence of unigrams. In specific, the unigram terms are encoded by a modified Term Frequency - Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm, which only implements the IDF part of TF-IDF. Besides the proposed model, this paper also presents a rigorous experimental pipeline for analysing grant applications, and the experimental results prove its feasibility.

VTLayout: Fusion of Visual and Text Features for Document Layout Analysis

Documents often contain complex physical structures, which make the Document Layout Analysis (DLA) task challenging. As a pre-processing step for content extraction, DLA has the potential to capture rich information in historical or scientific documents on a large scale. Although many deep-learning-based methods from computer vision have already achieved excellent performance in detecting \emph{Figure} from documents, they are still unsatisfactory in recognizing the \emph{List}, \emph{Table}, \emph{Text} and \emph{Title} category blocks in DLA. This paper proposes a VTLayout model fusing the documents' deep visual, shallow visual, and text features to localize and identify different category blocks. The model mainly includes two stages, and the three feature extractors are built in the second stage. In the first stage, the Cascade Mask R-CNN model is applied directly to localize all category blocks of the documents. In the second stage, the deep visual, shallow visual, and text features are extracted for fusion to identify the category blocks of documents. As a result, we strengthen the classification power of different category blocks based on the existing localization technique. The experimental results show that the identification capability of the VTLayout is superior to the most advanced method of DLA based on the PubLayNet dataset, and the F1 score is as high as 0.9599.