12. The method as set forth in claim 11 , further comprising: conditional upon the identifying initially not identifying any caption signatures, repeating the assigning and identifying wherein the repeated assigning employs a different text fragment representation.
11. A method for detecting captions in a document that includes text fragments and objects of interest, the method comprising: assigning a signature to each text fragment, the signature being the value for that text fragment of a text fragment representation comprising at least one text fragment attribute; computing a near property for each text fragment, the near property having a near value if the proximity of the text fragment to at least one object of interest in the document satisfies a near criterion and a value other than the near value otherwise, wherein the near criterion is satisfied conditional upon there being no intervening text fragments between text fragment for which the near property is being computed and at least one object of interest; identifying a caption signature as a signature assigned to a substantial number of text fragments that are near at least one object of interest in the document, the near property being used in the identifying to recognize text fragments that are near at least one object of interest in the document; and detecting one or more captions as one or more text fragments each assigned a caption signature.