Table understanding in structured documents
This work addresses a challenging problem for processing business documents, but it is incremental as it adapts existing methods to a more difficult domain.
The paper tackled table detection and extraction in layout-heavy business documents like invoices, where tables lack clear outlines and have ragged columns, by proposing a novel neural network model that achieved strong, practical results on a new dataset of pro forma invoices, invoices, and debit notes.
Abstract--- Table detection and extraction has been studied in the context of documents like reports, where tables are clearly outlined and stand out from the document structure visually. We study this topic in a rather more challenging domain of layout-heavy business documents, particularly invoices. Invoices present the novel challenges of tables being often without outlines - either in the form of borders or surrounding text flow - with ragged columns and widely varying data content. We will also show, that we can extract specific information from structurally different tables or table-like structures with one model. We present a comprehensive representation of a page using graph over word boxes, positional embeddings, trainable textual features and rephrase the table detection as a text box labeling problem. We will work on our newly presented dataset of pro forma invoices, invoices and debit note documents using this representation and propose multiple baselines to solve this labeling problem. We then propose a novel neural network model that achieves strong, practical results on the presented dataset and analyze the model performance and effects of graph convolutions and self-attention in detail.