Text Classification Models for Form Entity Linking
This addresses the challenge of automatically extracting information from diverse scanned forms in fields like administration and finance, though it is incremental as it builds on existing techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of entity linking in scanned forms by combining image processing with a BERT-based text classification model, achieving state-of-the-art results with a 0.80 F1-score on the FUNSD dataset, a 5% improvement over previous methods.
Forms are a widespread type of template-based document used in a great variety of fields including, among others, administration, medicine, finance, or insurance. The automatic extraction of the information included in these documents is greatly demanded due to the increasing volume of forms that are generated in a daily basis. However, this is not a straightforward task when working with scanned forms because of the great diversity of templates with different location of form entities, and the quality of the scanned documents. In this context, there is a feature that is shared by all forms: they contain a collection of interlinked entities built as key-value (or label-value) pairs, together with other entities such as headers or images. In this work, we have tacked the problem of entity linking in forms by combining image processing techniques and a text classification model based on the BERT architecture. This approach achieves state-of-the-art results with a F1-score of 0.80 on the FUNSD dataset, a 5% improvement regarding the best previous method. The code of this project is available at https://github.com/mavillot/FUNSD-Entity-Linking.