Scientific evidence extraction
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Recently, interest has grown in applying machine learning to the problem of table structure inference and extraction from unstructured documents. However, progress in this area has been challenging both to make and to measure, due to several issues that arise in training and evaluating models from labeled data. This includes challenges as fundamental as the lack of a single definitive ground truth output for each input sample and the lack of an ideal metric for measuring partial correctness for this task. To address these we propose a new dataset, PubMed Tables One Million (PubTables-1M), and a new class of metric, grid table similarity (GriTS). PubTables-1M is nearly twice as large as the previous largest comparable dataset, can be used for models across multiple architectures and modalities, and addresses issues such as ambiguity and lack of consistency in the annotations. We apply DETR to table extraction for the first time and show that object detection models trained on PubTables-1M produce excellent results out-of-the-box for all three tasks of detection, structure recognition, and functional analysis. We describe the dataset in detail to enable others to build on our work and combine this data with other datasets for these and related tasks. It is our hope that PubTables-1M and the proposed metrics can further progress in this area by creating a benchmark suitable for training and evaluating a wide variety of models for table extraction. Data and code will be released at https://github.com/microsoft/table-transformer.
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