Importance weighting is widely applicable in machine learning in general and in techniques dealing with data covariate shift problems in particular. A novel, direct approach to determine such importance weighting is presented. It relies on a nearest neighbor classification scheme and is relatively straightforward to implement. Comparative experiments on various classification tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of our so-called nearest neighbor weighting (NNeW) scheme. Considering its performance, our procedure can act as a simple and effective baseline method for importance weighting.

Table recognition is a well-studied problem in document analysis, and many academic and commercial approaches have been developed to recognize tables in several document formats, including plain text, scanned page images, and born-digital, object-based formats such as PDF. There are several works that can convert tables in text-based PDF format into structured representations. However, there is limited work on image-based table content recognition. The proposed challenge aims at assessing the ability of state-of-the-art methods to recognize scientific tables in LaTeX format. Our shared task has two subtasks.