Kleister: A novel task for Information Extraction involving Long Documents with Complex Layout
Adam Mickiewicz University（亚当·密茨凯维奇大学）；Nicolaus Copernicus University（尼古拉·哥白尼大学）；Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Samsung R&D Institute Poland（三星波兰研发研究所）
Filip Graliński, Tomasz Stanisławek, Anna Wróblewska, Dawid Lipiński, Agnieszka Kaliska, Paulina Rosalska, Bartosz Topolski, Przemysław Biecek
State-of-the-art solutions for Natural Language Processing (NLP) are able to capture a broad range of contexts, like the sentence-level context or document-level context for short documents. But these solutions are still struggling when it comes to longer, real-world documents with the information encoded in the spatial structure of the document, such as page elements like tables, forms, headers, openings or footers; complex page layout or presence of multiple pages.
To encourage progress on deeper and more complex Information Extraction (IE) we introduce a new task (named Kleister) with two new datasets. Utilizing both textual and structural layout features, an NLP system must find the most important information, about various types of entities, in long formal documents. We propose Pipeline method as a text-only baseline with different Named Entity Recognition architectures (Flair, BERT, RoBERTa). Moreover, we checked the most popular PDF processing tools for text extraction (pdf2djvu, Tesseract and Textract) in order to analyze behavior of IE system in presence of errors introduced by these tools.
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Adam Mickiewicz University（亚当·密茨凯维奇大学）
We introduce a simple new approach to the problem of understanding documents where non-trivial layout influences the local semantics. To this end, we modify the Transformer encoder architecture in a way that allows it to use layout features obtained from an OCR system, without the need to re-learn language semantics from scratch. We only augment the input of the model with the coordinates of token bounding boxes, avoiding, in this way, the use of raw images. This leads to a layout-aware language model which can then be fine-tuned on downstream tasks. The model is evaluated on an end-to-end inf…
Warsaw University of Technology（华沙理工大学）；Adam Mickiewicz University（亚当·密茨凯维奇大学）；Samsung R&D Institute Poland（三星波兰研发研究院）
The relevance of the Key Information Extraction (KIE) task is increasingly important in natural language processing problems. But there are still only a few well-defined problems that serve as benchmarks for solutions in this area. To bridge this gap, we introduce two new datasets (Kleister NDA and Kleister Charity). They involve a mix of scanned and born-digital long formal English-language documents. In these datasets, an NLP system is expected to find or infer various types of entities by employing both textual and structural layout features. The Kleister Charity dataset consists of 2,788 a…
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Pre-training techniques have been verified successfully in a variety of NLP tasks in recent years. Despite the widespread use of pre-training models for NLP applications, they almost exclusively focus on text-level manipulation, while neglecting layout and style information that is vital for document image understanding. In this paper, we propose the \textbf{LayoutLM} to jointly model interactions between text and layout information across scanned document images, which is beneficial for a great number of real-world document image understanding tasks such as information extraction from scanned…
While storing invoice content as metadata to avoid paper document processing may be the future trend, almost all of daily issued invoices are still printed on paper or generated in digital formats such as PDFs. In this paper, we introduce the OCRMiner system for information extraction from scanned document images which is based on text analysis techniques in combination with layout features to extract indexing metadata of (semi-)structured documents. The system is designed to process the document in a similar way a human reader uses, i.e. to employ different layout and text attributes in a coo…
Recent years have witnessed the rise and success of pre-training techniques in visually-rich document understanding. However, most existing methods lack the systematic mining and utilization of layout-centered knowledge, leading to sub-optimal performances. In this paper, we propose ERNIE-Layout, a novel document pre-training solution with layout knowledge enhancement in the whole workflow, to learn better representations that combine the features from text, layout, and image. Specifically, we first rearrange input sequences in the serialization stage, and then present a correlative pre-traini…
Natural language processing for document scans and PDFs has the potential to enormously improve the efficiency of business processes. Layout-aware word embeddings such as LayoutLM have shown promise for classification of and information extraction from such documents. This paper proposes a new pre-training task called that can improve performance of layout-aware word embeddings that incorporate 2-D position embeddings. We compare models pre-trained with only language masking against models pre-trained with both language masking and position masking, and we find that position masking improves p…
Unveiling the Deficiencies of Pre-trained Text-and-Layout Models in Real-world Visually-rich Document Information Extraction
School of Computer Science, Fudan University（复旦大学计算机科学学院）；School of Statistics and Data Science, Nankai University（南开大学统计与数据科学学院）；Ant Tiansuan Security Lab, Ant Group（蚂蚁集团蚂蚁天算安全实验室）
This paper investigates the Relation Extraction task in documents by benchmarking two different neural network models: a multi-modal language model (LayoutXLM) and a Graph Neural Network: Edge Convolution Network (ECN). For this benchmark, we use the XFUND dataset, released along with LayoutXLM. While both models reach similar results, they both exhibit very different characteristics. This raises the question on how to integrate various modalities in a neural network: by merging all modalities thanks to additional pretraining (LayoutXLM), or in a cascaded way (ECN). We conclude by discussing s…
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院信息工程研究所）；School of Cyber Security, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学网络空间安全学院）；DAMO Academy, Alibaba Group（阿里巴巴集团达摩院）
Building document-grounded dialogue systems have received growing interest as documents convey a wealth of human knowledge and commonly exist in enterprises. Wherein, how to comprehend and retrieve information from documents is a challenging research problem. Previous work ignores the visual property of documents and treats them as plain text, resulting in incomplete modality. In this paper, we propose a Layout-aware document-level Information Extraction dataset, LIE, to facilitate the study of extracting both structural and semantic knowledge from visually rich documents (VRDs), so as to gene…
Enhancing Document AI Data Generation Through Graph-Based Synthetic Layouts
Liverpool John Moores University（利物浦约翰摩尔斯大学）；University of Washington（华盛顿大学）；Columbia University（哥伦比亚大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；Birla Institute of Technology（贝拉理工学院）
UNIKIE-BENCH: Benchmarking Large Multimodal Models for Key Information Extraction in Visual Documents
School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, China（东北大学计算机科学与工程学院）；Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China（清华大学计算机科学与技术系）；Alibaba Group, Hangzhou, China（阿里巴巴集团）
University of Alberta（阿尔伯塔大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Recent approaches in literature have exploited the multi-modal information in documents (text, layout, image) to serve specific downstream document tasks. However, they are limited by their - (i) inability to learn cross-modal representations across text, layout and image dimensions for documents and (ii) inability to process multi-page documents. Pre-training techniques have been shown in Natural Language Processing (NLP) domain to learn generic textual representations from large unlabelled datasets, applicable to various downstream NLP tasks. In this paper, we propose a multi-task learning-b…
MoDora: Tree-Based Semi-Structured Document Analysis System
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Beihang University（北航）；Shanghai AI Lab（上海人工智能实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Institute for Clarity in Documentation（文档清晰性研究所）；Inria Paris-Rocquencourt（Inria巴黎-罗quentcourt研究中心）；East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Scientific Writing Academy（科学写作学院）
Harbin Institute of Technology（哈尔滨工业大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Microsoft Azure AI（微软 Azure AI）；Soochow University（苏州大学）
Pre-training of text and layout has proved effective in a variety of visually-rich document understanding tasks due to its effective model architecture and the advantage of large-scale unlabeled scanned/digital-born documents. We propose LayoutLMv2 architecture with new pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, layout, and image in a single multi-modal framework. Specifically, with a two-stream multi-modal Transformer encoder, LayoutLMv2 uses not only the existing masked visual-language modeling task but also the new text-image alignment and text-image matching tasks, which make …
Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is an important step when parsing the documents into structured machine-readable format for downstream applications. Deep neural networks that are developed for computer vision have been proven to be an effective method to analyze layout of document images. However, document layout datasets that are currently publicly available are several magnitudes smaller than established computing vision datasets. Models have to be trained by transfer learning from a base model that is pre-trained on a traditional computer vision dataset. In this pap…
Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）；Beihang University（北京航空航天大学）
Document layout analysis usually relies on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring textual information that is vital to capture. Meanwhile, high quality labeled datasets with both visual and textual information are still insufficient. In this paper, we present \textbf{DocBank}, a benchmark dataset that contains 500K document pages with fine-grained token-level annotations for document layout analysis. DocBank is constructed using a simple yet effective way with weak supervision from the \LaTeX{} documents available on the arXiv.com. With DocBank, models from different mod…
Are Layout-Infused Language Models Robust to Layout Distribution Shifts? A Case Study with Scientific Documents
University of California Berkeley（加州大学伯克利分校）；Massachusetts Institute of Technology（麻省理工学院）；Allen Institute for AI（艾伦人工智能研究所）；Hebrew University of Jerusalem（希伯来大学）；Northwestern University（西北大学）
South China University of Technology（华南理工大学）；Peng Cheng Laboratory（鹏城实验室）；IntSig Information Co., Ltd（合合信息科技股份有限公司）
Structured document understanding has attracted considerable attention and made significant progress recently, owing to its crucial role in intelligent document processing. However, most existing related models can only deal with the document data of specific language(s) (typically English) included in the pre-training collection, which is extremely limited. To address this issue, we propose a simple yet effective Language-independent Layout Transformer (LiLT) for structured document understanding. LiLT can be pre-trained on the structured documents of a single language and then directly fine-…
University of California, San Diego（加利福尼亚大学圣迭戈分校）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD documents is embedded in their XML metadata; meanwhile, it is easy to convert WORD documents to PDFs or images. Therefore, in an automated manner, we construct ReadingBank, a benchmark dataset that contains reading order, text, and layout information for 500,000 document images covering a wide spectru…
Transformer-based pre-training techniques of text and layout have proven effective in a number of document understanding tasks. Despite this success, multimodal pre-training models suffer from very high computational and memory costs. Motivated by human reading strategies, this paper presents Skim-Attention, a new attention mechanism that takes advantage of the structure of the document and its layout. Skim-Attention only attends to the 2-dimensional position of the words in a document. Our experiments show that Skim-Attention obtains a lower perplexity than prior works, while being more compu…
Shanghai Jiao Tong University（上海交通大学）；Microsoft Research Asia（微软亚洲研究院）
Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has made significant progress for Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU), especially the fixed-layout documents such as scanned document images. While, there are still a large number of digital documents where the layout information is not fixed and needs to be interactively and dynamically rendered for visualization, making existing layout-based pre-training approaches not easy to apply. In this paper, we propose MarkupLM for document understanding tasks with markup languages as the backbone, such as HTML/XML-based documents, where tex…
NAVER CLOVA；KAIST（韩国科学技术院）；LBox；Upstage AI Research（Upstage人工智能研究院）；Upstage AI（Upstage人工智能）
Key information extraction (KIE) from document images requires understanding the contextual and spatial semantics of texts in two-dimensional (2D) space. Many recent studies try to solve the task by developing pre-trained language models focusing on combining visual features from document images with texts and their layout. On the other hand, this paper tackles the problem by going back to the basic: effective combination of text and layout. Specifically, we propose a pre-trained language model, named BROS (BERT Relying On Spatiality), that encodes relative positions of texts in 2D space and l…
Processing the structure of documents: Logical Layout Analysis of historical newspapers in French
Centre de Recherches Interdisciplinaires et Transculturelles (CRIT)（跨学科与跨文化研究中心（CRIT））；Université de Bourgogne Franche-Comté（勃艮第-弗朗什-孔泰大学）；Institut Universitaire de France (IUF)（法国大学研究院（IUF））
Detecting automatically the layout of clinical documents to enhance the performances of downstream natural language processing
Sorbonne Université（索邦大学）；Inserm（法国国家健康与医学研究院）；Institut Pierre-Louis d'Epidémiologie et de Santé Publique（皮埃尔-路易流行病学与公共卫生研究所）；Assistance Publique-Hôpitaux de Paris（巴黎公共医疗集团）；LIMICS（医学信息学与信号处理实验室）
Recently, various multimodal networks for Visually-Rich Document Understanding(VRDU) have been proposed, showing the promotion of transformers by integrating visual and layout information with the text embeddings. However, most existing approaches utilize the position embeddings to incorporate the sequence information, neglecting the noisy improper reading order obtained by OCR tools. In this paper, we propose a robust layout-aware multimodal network named XYLayoutLM to capture and leverage rich layout information from proper reading orders produced by our Augmented XY Cut. Moreover, a Dilated…
Poznan University of Technology（波兹南理工大学）；Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań（波兹南亚当·密茨凯维奇大学）；Jagiellonian University（雅盖隆大学）
We address the challenging problem of Natural Language Comprehension beyond plain-text documents by introducing the TILT neural network architecture which simultaneously learns layout information, visual features, and textual semantics. Contrary to previous approaches, we rely on a decoder capable of unifying a variety of problems involving natural language. The layout is represented as an attention bias and complemented with contextualized visual information, while the core of our model is a pretrained encoder-decoder Transformer. Our novel approach achieves state-of-the-art results in extrac…
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Funstory.ai Limited（Funstory.ai有限公司）
University of California, Los Angeles（加州大学洛杉矶分校）；Google Research（谷歌研究院）
Document layout comprises both structural and visual (eg. font-sizes) information that is vital but often ignored by machine learning models. The few existing models which do use layout information only consider textual contents, and overlook the existence of contents in other modalities such as images. Additionally, spatial interactions of presented contents in a layout were never really fully exploited. To bridge this gap, we parse a document into content blocks (eg. text, table, image) and propose a novel layout-aware multimodal hierarchical framework, LAMPreT, to model the blocks and the w…
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill（北卡罗来纳大学教堂山分校）；Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services Research（微软Azure认知服务研究院）；Microsoft Azure Visual Document Intelligence（微软Azure视觉文档智能部门）
We propose Universal Document Processing (UDOP), a foundation Document AI model which unifies text, image, and layout modalities together with varied task formats, including document understanding and generation. UDOP leverages the spatial correlation between textual content and document image to model image, text, and layout modalities with one uniform representation. With a novel Vision-Text-Layout Transformer, UDOP unifies pretraining and multi-domain downstream tasks into a prompt-based sequence generation scheme. UDOP is pretrained on both large-scale unlabeled document corpora using inno…
Heterogeneous Element-Aware Cross-Version Differencing of Scientific Documents via Layout-Aware Alignment and Structure-Aware Reasoning
Beijing Renhe Information Technology Co., Ltd.（北京人和信息技术有限公司）；Key Laboratory of Digital Publishing and Total Process Management of Scientific and Technical Journals（科技期刊数字出版与全程管理重点实验室）
Due to the complex layouts of documents, it is challenging to extract information for documents. Most previous studies develop multimodal pre-trained models in a self-supervised way. In this paper, we focus on the embedding learning of word blocks containing text and layout information, and propose UTel, a language model with Unified TExt and Layout pre-training. Specifically, we propose two pre-training tasks: Surrounding Word Prediction (SWP) for the layout learning, and Contrastive learning of Word Embeddings (CWE) for identifying different word blocks. Moreover, we replace the commonly use…
Page layout analysis is a fundamental step in document processing which enables to segment a page into regions of interest. With highly complex layouts and mixed scripts, scholarly commentaries are text-heavy documents which remain challenging for state-of-the-art models. Their layout considerably varies across editions and their most important regions are mainly defined by semantic rather than graphical characteristics such as position or appearance. This setting calls for a comparison between textual, visual and hybrid approaches. We therefore assess the performances of two transformers (Lay…
We present a framework to analyze color documents of complex layout. In addition, no assumption is made on the layout. Our framework combines in a content-driven bottom-up approach two different sources of information: textual and spatial. To analyze the text, shallow natural language processing tools, such as taggers and partial parsers, are used. To infer relations of the logical layout we resort to a qualitative spatial calculus closely related to Allen's calculus. We evaluate the system against documents from a color journal and present the results of extracting the reading order from the …
