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We present document domain randomization (DDR), the first successful transfer of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) trained only on graphically rendered pseudo-paper pages to real-world document segmentation. DDR renders pseudo-document pages by modeling randomized textual and non-textual contents of interest, with user-defined layout and font styles to support joint learning of fine-grained classes. We demonstrate competitive results using our DDR approach to extract nine document classes from the benchmark CS-150 and papers published in two domains, namely annual meetings of Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and IEEE Visualization (VIS). We compare DDR to conditions of style mismatch, fewer or more noisy samples that are more easily obtained in the real world. We show that high-fidelity semantic information is not necessary to label semantic classes but style mismatch between train and test can lower model accuracy. Using smaller training samples had a slightly detrimental effect. Finally, network models still achieved high test accuracy when correct labels are diluted towards confusing labels; this behavior hold across several classes.
Document-level Relation Extraction (RE) requires extracting relations expressed within and across sentences. Recent works show that graph-based methods, usually constructing a document-level graph that captures document-aware interactions, can obtain useful entity representations thus helping tackle document-level RE. These methods either focus more on the entire graph, or pay more attention to a part of the graph, e.g., paths between the target entity pair. However, we find that document-level RE may benefit from focusing on both of them simultaneously. Therefore, to obtain more comprehensive entity representations, we propose the Coarse-to-Fine Entity Representation model (CFER) that adopts a coarse-to-fine strategy involving two phases. First, CFER uses graph neural networks to integrate global information in the entire graph at a coarse level. Next, CFER utilizes the global information as a guidance to selectively aggregate path information between the target entity pair at a fine level. In classification, we combine the entity representations from both two levels into more comprehensive representations for relation extraction. Experimental results on two document-level RE datasets, DocRED and CDR, show that CFER outperforms existing models and is robust to the uneven label distribution.
Layout is a fundamental component of any graphic design. Creating large varieties of plausible document layouts can be a tedious task, requiring numerous constraints to be satisfied, including local ones relating different semantic elements and global constraints on the general appearance and spacing. In this paper, we present a novel framework, coined READ, for REcursive Autoencoders for Document layout generation, to generate plausible 2D layouts of documents in large quantities and varieties. First, we devise an exploratory recursive method to extract a structural decomposition of a single document. Leveraging a dataset of documents annotated with labeled bounding boxes, our recursive neural network learns to map the structural representation, given in the form of a simple hierarchy, to a compact code, the space of which is approximated by a Gaussian distribution. Novel hierarchies can be sampled from this space, obtaining new document layouts. Moreover, we introduce a combinatorial metric to measure structural similarity among document layouts. We deploy it to show that our method is able to generate highly variable and realistic layouts. We further demonstrate the utility of our generated layouts in the context of standard detection tasks on documents, showing that detection performance improves when the training data is augmented with generated documents whose layouts are produced by READ.
Document layout analysis (DLA) aims to divide a document image into different types of regions. DLA plays an important role in the document content understanding and information extraction systems. Exploring a method that can use less data for effective training contributes to the development of DLA. We consider a Human-in-the-loop (HITL) collaborative intelligence in the DLA. Our approach was inspired by the fact that the HITL push the model to learn from the unknown problems by adding a small amount of data based on knowledge. The HITL select key samples by using confidence. However, using confidence to find key samples is not suitable for DLA tasks. We propose the Key Samples Selection (KSS) method to find key samples in high-level tasks (semantic segmentation) more accurately through agent collaboration, effectively reducing costs. Once selected, these key samples are passed to human beings for active labeling, then the model will be updated with the labeled samples. Hence, we revisited the learning system from reinforcement learning and designed a sample-based agent update strategy, which effectively improves the agents ability to accept new samples. It achieves significant improvement results in two benchmarks (DSSE-200 (from 77.1% to 86.3%) and CS-150 (from 88.0% to 95.6%)) by using 10% of labeled data.
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 computationally efficient. Skim-Attention can be further combined with long-range Transformers to efficiently process long documents. We also show how Skim-Attention can be used off-the-shelf as a mask for any Pre-trained Language Model, allowing to improve their performance while restricting attention. Finally, we show the emergence of a document structure representation in Skim-Attention.
Recent advancements in the area of Computer Vision with state-of-art Neural Networks has given a boost to Optical Character Recognition (OCR) accuracies. However, extracting characters/text alone is often insufficient for relevant information extraction as documents also have a visual structure that is not captured by OCR. Extracting information from tables, charts, footnotes, boxes, headings and retrieving the corresponding structured representation for the document remains a challenge and finds application in a large number of real-world use cases. In this paper, we propose a novel enterprise based end-to-end framework called DeepReader which facilitates information extraction from document images via identification of visual entities and populating a meta relational model across different entities in the document image. The model schema allows for an easy to understand abstraction of the entities detected by the deep vision models and the relationships between them. DeepReader has a suite of state-of-the-art vision algorithms which are applied to recognize handwritten and printed text, eliminate noisy effects, identify the type of documents and detect visual entities like tables, lines and boxes. Deep Reader maps the extracted entities into a rich relational schema so as to capture all the relevant relationships between entities (words, textboxes, lines etc) detected in the document. Relevant information and fields can then be extracted from the document by writing SQL queries on top of the relationship tables. A natural language based interface is added on top of the relationship schema so that a non-technical user, specifying the queries in natural language, can fetch the information with minimal effort. In this paper, we also demonstrate many different capabilities of Deep Reader and report results on a real-world use case.