Bohou Li

Eric Anderson, Jonathan Fritz, Austin Lee et al.

LLMs demonstrate an uncanny ability to process unstructured data, and as such, have the potential to go beyond search and run complex, semantic analyses at scale. We describe the design of an unstructured analytics system, Aryn, and the tenets and use cases that motivate its design. With Aryn, users specify queries in natural language and the system automatically determines a semantic plan and executes it to compute an answer from a large collection of unstructured documents. At the core of Aryn is Sycamore, a declarative document processing engine, that provides a reliable distributed abstraction called DocSets. Sycamore allows users to analyze, enrich, and transform complex documents at scale. Aryn includes Luna, a query planner that translates natural language queries to Sycamore scripts, and DocParse, which takes raw PDFs and document images, and converts them to DocSets for downstream processing. We show how these pieces come together to achieve better accuracy than RAG on analytics queries over real world reports from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Also, given current limitations of LLMs, we argue that an analytics system must provide explainability to be practical, and show how Aryn's user interface does this to help build trust.

Bohou Li, Benjamin Sowell, Mehul Shah et al.

In visually-rich documents, information is encoded not only in individual page objects such as tables, headers, and text blocks, but also in the structural relations among them, making document structure analysis fundamental to information retrieval and document understanding. However, accurately inferring such relations remains challenging in multi-page documents with long-range dependencies and heterogeneous layouts. To address this, we propose a tree-guided and self-regressive framework, termed DOcument Structure Analyzer (DOSA), for inferring relations among page objects and reconstructing document-level semantic trees. DOSA processes documents chunk-by-chunk, fusing visual, textual, and layout features for each page object and predicting hierarchical and ordering relations. The predicted relations are used to incrementally construct a semantic tree, which is then leveraged as structural context to guide inference on subsequent chunks. Experimental results on five benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of DOSA, with improvements of up to 4 F1 points and 19 TEDS points on DocHieNet, the most challenging multi-page hierarchy benchmark.