GMN: Generative Multi-modal Network for Practical Document Information Extraction
This addresses the challenge of practical document information extraction for real-world applications, offering a robust solution that reduces annotation effort and handles noisy data, though it appears incremental in improving existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of extracting information from complex documents with noisy OCR and variable layouts by proposing GMN, a generative multi-modal network that achieves new state-of-the-art performance on several public datasets, surpassing other methods by a large margin in realistic scenarios.
Document Information Extraction (DIE) has attracted increasing attention due to its various advanced applications in the real world. Although recent literature has already achieved competitive results, these approaches usually fail when dealing with complex documents with noisy OCR results or mutative layouts. This paper proposes Generative Multi-modal Network (GMN) for real-world scenarios to address these problems, which is a robust multi-modal generation method without predefined label categories. With the carefully designed spatial encoder and modal-aware mask module, GMN can deal with complex documents that are hard to serialized into sequential order. Moreover, GMN tolerates errors in OCR results and requires no character-level annotation, which is vital because fine-grained annotation of numerous documents is laborious and even requires annotators with specialized domain knowledge. Extensive experiments show that GMN achieves new state-of-the-art performance on several public DIE datasets and surpasses other methods by a large margin, especially in realistic scenes.