Benchmark for extractions tasks on visually rich documents.

Data and Tasks

Our paper A Benchmark for Structured Extractions from Complex Documents can be found at https://arxiv.org/abs/2211.15421.

The dataset consists of 2 corpora VRDU-Registration Forms (aka FARA) and VRDU-Ad-buy Forms (aka DeepForm). VRDU-Registration Forms consist of public documents downloaded from the US Department of Justice. VRDU-Ad-buy Forms consist of public documents from FCC PublicFiles. VRDU-Registration Form is the simpler of the two -- containing fewer fields, only three distinct templates, and only simple fields. VRDU-Ad-buy Forms on the other hand consist of more than a dozen fields, dozens of templates (distinct layouts), and more complex fields (nested, repeated fields).

For each corpus, we provide:

• main/pdfs: a directory with the raw PDFs (for convenience, you can also download them from the original source websites).
• main/dataset.jsonl: the OCR output corresponding to each PDF, and structured annotations for each document obtained by asking human annotators to draw a bounding box around each specified field of interest. It needs to be decompressed first with gzip -d main/dataset.jsonl.gz.
• main/meta.json: mapping from the entity names in each corpus to a type-specific match function (eg. DateMatch, NumericalMatch, PriceMatch, etc.) used to compare predictions with the ground truth.
• few_shot-splits/ : train/validation/test splits for various tasks provided through JSON files containing the filenames that should go into each bucket.

dataset.jsonl contains the following attributes:

• filename (name of the file in the subdirectory for which this object contains other data).
• ocr (output from the OCR tool that provides text detected on each page along with the coordinates on the page)
• annotations (list of entity names along with the text value extracted from a span in the document and a bounding box corresponding to the given entity, e.g.: "annotations": [["registration_num", [["3712\n", [0, 0.46376812, 0.32893434, 0.5, 0.3447707], [[2380, 2385]]]]]

Tasks

There are three kinds of tasks -- Single Template Learning (STL), Mixed Template Learning (MTL), and Unseen Template Learning (UTL), indicated by "lv1", "lv2", or "lv3" in the name of the split file provided in few_shot-splits:

• STL: train and test documents contain documents belonging to the same (single) template. This task is particularly useful to understand if we need different approaches to deal with mostly-fixed-layout documents vs. documents that vary substantially in their layouts.

• MTL: train and test documents are drawn from the same set of templates. This task is useful to understand if an approach can work across multiple layouts to present the same information.

• UTL: train and test documents are drawn from disjoint sets of templates. This task helps us understand if an approach can truly generalize to unseen layouts and templates. We expect this to be the hardest task, since new templates may look substantially different from templates previously seen.

Each split file contains three list-valued fields: train/valid/split, each with a list of filenames present in the filename attribute in dataset.jsonl. Split files provide examples with 10, 50, 100, and 200 training instances each. The splits are present to mitigate the large variance that may result from sampling different training docs for the few-shot setting.

Evaluation Tools

The evaluation tool is maintained at https://github.com/google-research/google-research/tree/master/vrdu.

The python -m command assumes you are in the google_research/ directory.

Sample invocation of the evaluation binary (on one dataset):

python -m vrdu.evaluate \
--base_dirpath='/path/to/vrdu/registration-form/' \
--extraction_path='/path/to/results/fara-modelFoo/' \
--eval_output_path='/path/to/results/fara-modelFoo-results.csv'

Note that extraction_path contains model outputs of JSON format. Each JSON file corresponds to a task (split), meaning the file name starts with the split name and end with -test_predictions.json.