Line-items and table understanding in structured documents
share
Table detection and extraction has been studied in the context of documents like scientific papers, where tables are clearly outlined and stand out from the visual document structure. 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 different structural information from different table-like structures. 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 a new dataset of invoices 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.
READ FULL TEXT