1. A method of partitioning a structured document, comprising: on a server system having one or more processors that execute programs stored in the memory of the server system, under the control of procedures executed by the server system: translating the document into an initial hierarchical data structure in accordance with syntactic elements defined in the document, the initial hierarchical data structure including a plurality of nodes corresponding to the syntactic elements; annotating each node with a set of attributes including geometric parameters, wherein the geometric parameters are assigned in accordance with a pseudo-rendering of the document that identifies locations of semantically distinct regions of the document in accordance with the syntactic elements in the document; and merging the nodes in the initial hierarchical data structure into a tree of nodes in accordance with their respective attributes, including the geometric parameters, and a set of predefined rules, the set of predefined rules including rules for merging nodes having nearby positions in the pseudo-rendering and/or having compatible attributes.
1. A method of partitioning a structured document, comprising: on a server system having one or more processors that execute programs stored in the memory of the server system, under the control of procedures executed by the server system: translating the document into an initial hierarchical data structure in accordance with syntactic elements defined in the document, the initial hierarchical data structure including a plurality of nodes corresponding to the syntactic elements; annotating each node with a set of attributes including geometric parameters, wherein the geometric parameters are assigned in accordance with a pseudo-rendering of the document that identifies locations of semantically distinct regions of the document in accordance with the syntactic elements in the document; and merging the nodes in the initial hierarchical data structure into a tree of nodes in accordance with their respective attributes, including the geometric parameters, and a set of predefined rules, the set of predefined rules including rules for merging nodes having nearby positions in the pseudo-rendering and/or having compatible attributes. 9. The method of claim 1 , wherein the merging of the nodes in the initial hierarchical data structure includes a plurality of actions selected from the group consisting of: merging a child node into its parent node if the child node is the only child of the parent node; expanding a child node into multiple child nodes if the child node is associated with multiple semantic elements; identifying a group of nodes sharing a set of compatible attributes, the compatible attributes including that semantic elements associated with the group of nodes having similar geometric parameters and the semantic elements appearing in the pseudo-rendered document in a periodic or semi-periodic manner; assigning a preliminary tag to a node, the preliminary tag identifying function and location of semantic elements in the pseudo-rendered document associated with the node in accordance with their respective geometric information; merging sibling nodes having compatible preliminary tags into their parent node; and assigning a final tag to each node of the tree of nodes.