Generating synopses for document-element search

Scientists often search for document-elements like tables, figures, or algorithm pseudo-codes. Domain scientists and researchers report important data, results and algorithms using these document-elements; readers want to compare the reported results with their findings. Some document-element search engines have been proposed (especially to search for tables and figures) to make this task easier. While searching for document-elements today, the end-user is presented with the caption of the document-element and a sentence in the document text that refers to the document-element. Oftentimes, the caption and the reference text do not contain enough information to interpret the document-element. In this paper, we present the first set of methods to extract this useful information (synopsis) related to document-elements automatically. We also investigate the problem of choosing the optimum synopsis-size that strikes a balance between information content and size of the generated synopses.