Let It Flow: Government e pubs (NYPL Open Book Hack 2014)

Let it Flow:
Government Documents
PDF (or PDF + XML) to reflowable EPUB
Open Book Hackathon, NYPL
January 11-13, 2014

Proposed Tasks: Legal ePUB
What would users want?
● Remove hard line breaks for continuous, reflowable display in multiple formats/modes.
● Parse metadata from header information, pagination and other semantic content.
● Parse citation of previous opinions or laws and link to cited legislation.
● Create stylesheet and page markup for display on devices.
It is important to:
● Ensure that data is formatted so that it flows naturally regardless of device used.
● Maintain information about pagination for citation and discovery purposes.

Proposed Tasks: Legal ePUB
What would users want?
● Remove hard line breaks for continuous, reflowable display in multiple formats/modes.
● Parse metadata from header information, pagination and other semantic content.
It is important to:
● Ensure that data is formatted so that it flows naturally regardless of device used.
● Maintain information about pagination for citation and discovery purposes.
We only had time for one thing.

Supreme Court Slip Opinions
● Supreme Court slip opinion documents are
available in PDF format.
● Dockets may contain multiple document
types:
○ Syllabus
○ Opinion of the Court
○ Per Curiam
○ Dissention

Metadata: SCOTUS Slip Opinions
Citation
Document Type
Notice
Presiding Court
Docket Number
Case Names/Parties to the Case
Date Decided
Justice
Opinion
Front matter for each document contains several centered blocks of content. At first glance, the
documents contain minimal structural information.

XML Format
<text top="171" left="676" width="15" height="16" font="0">1 </text>
<text top="174" left="234" width="71" height="13" font="1">(Slip Opinion) </text>
<text top="171" left="380" width="166" height="16" font="0">OCTOBER TERM, 2013 </text>
<text top="206" left="432" width="57" height="16" font="0">Syllabus </text>
<text top="237" left="284" width="362" height="13" font="1">NOTE: Where it is feasible, a syllabus (headnote) will be released, as is</text>
<text top="247" left="272" width="374" height="13" font="1">being done in connection with this case, at the time the opinion is issued.</text>
<text top="258" left="272" width="374" height="13" font="1">The syllabus constitutes no part of the opinion of the Court but has been</text>
<text top="269" left="272" width="380" height="13" font="1">prepared by the Reporter of Decisions for the convenience of the reader. </text>
<text top="280" left="272" width="343" height="13" font="1">See United States v. Detroit Timber & Lumber Co., 200 U. S.
321, 337. </text>
<text top="307" left="235" width="453" height="20" font="4">SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES </text>
<text top="390" left="370" width="183" height="20" font="3">KANSAS v. CHEEVER </text>
<text top="426" left="279" width="363" height="16" font="0">CERTIORARI TO THE SUPREME COURT OF KANSAS </text>
<text top="455" left="245" width="432" height="16" font="0">No. 12–609. Argued October 16, 2013—Decided December 11, 2013 </text>
We used Poppler to convert Supreme Court slip opinion documents (PDF) to XML. This
revealed position and size attributes for lines of text, but no structured semantic information.

XML Format: Font ID
321, 337. </text>
We may be able to use position and size attributes to identify content parts of the document. For
example, different parts of the document have varying positions, font sizes and line heights.

XML Format: Font ID
321, 337. </text>
In this document, the font attribute is 1 for the Note section, 3 for the names of the parties to the
case and 4 for the name of the presiding court.

XML Format: <page> attributes
Font sizes are defined after the <page> elements in the XML document. In this example, the title
of the Supreme Court of the United States has height=”20” and font=”4”, which corresponds to
fontspec id=”4”, which is defined as Times 20pt Black.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE pdf2xml SYSTEM "pdf2xml.dtd">
<pdf2xml producer="poppler" version="0.24.4">
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0" height="1188" width="918">
<fontspec id="0" size="11" family="Times" color="#000000"/>
...
Font ID 4 is
Times 20pt

XML Format: <page> attributes
Font specifications are defined within the page element. If subsequent pages require new font
IDs they are added after the <page> element.
<fontspec id="7" size="11" family="Times" color="#ff0000"/>
...

XML Format: Inconsistencies
Font sizes for specific id attributes are not consistent across all documents, BUT...
Docket 12-609
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0" height="1188"
width="918">
In this document The Supreme Court of the United States has font id
4.
Docket 12-729
<page number="1" position="absolute" top="0" left="0" height="1188"
width="918">
In this document The Supreme Court of the United States has font id
5.

XML Format: Commonalities
...we noticed that the position attributes for many content parts such as left margin and line
height were consistent across all documents. These content parts are noted above.
Content Parts with consistent text attribute values:
● Page elements have a height=”1188” and width=”918” on all documents.
● Decision date has the same attributes for left=”395” and height=”16” on all documents.
● “Cite as” is always top="171" left="366" width="189" height="16" font="0"
● Type of Opinion, e.g. “(Slip Opinion)” is always top="174" left="234" font="1"
● “Opinion of the Court” is always top="171" left="366" width="189" height="16" font="0"
● “Note” and “Notices” is always left="272" height="13" font="1"
○ Exception: sometimes the first line is indented at left=”284”
● The last line of a Note or Notice is always a reference to another court case, which always has top="280" left="
272" width="343" height="13" font="1">
● The name of the case (usually [partyA] v. [partyB]) is always height="20" font="3".

XML Format: left & height attributes
321, 337. </text>
Position of the left margin and line height may indicate a single text block. In this example, most
of the lines of the paragraph are indented to 272, while the first line of the paragraph is indented
to 284. Still, each line has the same line height.

Other Standard Format Elements
Page Headings Footnotes
Page header content alternates on even and odd pages, but the position and text attributes for
the included content is the same. Footers are always noted in superscript within the text and
displayed after a rule at the bottom of the page.

Tools for Text Mining
● Text Editing Initiative
● Court Listener: https://www.courtlistener.com/
● Semantic Parsing for Legal Texts (conference proceedings): http://www.lrec-conf.
org/proceedings/lrec2012/workshops/27.LREC%202012%20Workshop%20Proceedings%
20SPLeT.pdf
● Search and Replace
We looked at a number of pre-processing tools to add semantic information to the documents,
such as identifying docket number, case names, decision dates, presiding court, Justice name,
etc., as well as cited legislation and prior court cases.

Text Encoding Initiative
Text Encoding Initiative allows content producers to tag parts of a document with semantic information.
● footnotes glossing or commenting on any passage could be added;
● pointers linking parts of this text to others could be added;
● proper names of various kinds could be distinguished from the surrounding text;
● detailed bibliographic information about the text's provenance and context could be prefixed to it;
● a linguistic analysis of the passage into sentences, clauses, words, etc., could be provided, each unit being
associated with appropriate category codes;
● the text could be segmented into narrative or discourse units;
● systematic analysis or interpretation of the text could be included in the encoding, with potentially complex
alignment or linkage between the text and the analysis, or between the text and one or more translations of it;
● passages in the text could be linked to images or sound held on other media.
Source: TEI Lite: Encoding for Interchange: an introduction to the TEI <http://www.tei-c.org/release/doc/tei-p5-
exemplars/html/tei_lite.doc.html>

Parsing Metadata
Court Name in XML:
Could be rendered as the following, because the court always has attributes left=”235” and height=”20”:
HTML: SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES </name>
XML: <name id=”Supreme Court of the United States">SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES </name>
TEI: <rs type="organization" key=”SCOTUS”>SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES</rs>
As we discovered, certain semantically related blocks of text have common text attributes, like
position, line height and font id. We can add semantic markup to identify these blocks.

Parsing Citations

Creating the UI

Let It Flow: Government e pubs (NYPL Open Book Hack 2014)

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Let It Flow: Government e pubs (NYPL Open Book Hack 2014)