Entity Relation Extraction as Dependency Parsing in Visually Rich Documents

Yue Zhang, Zhang Bo, Rui Wang, Junjie Cao, Chen Li, Zuyi Bao


Abstract
Previous works on key information extraction from visually rich documents (VRDs) mainly focus on labeling the text within each bounding box (i.e.,semantic entity), while the relations in-between are largely unexplored. In this paper, we adapt the popular dependency parsing model, the biaffine parser, to this entity relation extraction task. Being different from the original dependency parsing model which recognizes dependency relations between words, we identify relations between groups of words with layout information instead. We have compared different representations of the semantic entity, different VRD encoders, and different relation decoders. For the model training, we explore multi-task learning to combine entity labeling and relation extraction tasks; and for the evaluation, we conduct experiments on different datasets with filtering and augmentation. The results demonstrate that our proposed model achieves 65.96% F1 score on the FUNSD dataset. As for the real-world application, our model has been applied to the in-house customs data, achieving reliable performance in the production setting.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.218
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2759–2768
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.218
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.218
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yue Zhang, Zhang Bo, Rui Wang, Junjie Cao, Chen Li, and Zuyi Bao. 2021. Entity Relation Extraction as Dependency Parsing in Visually Rich Documents. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2759–2768, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Entity Relation Extraction as Dependency Parsing in Visually Rich Documents (Zhang et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.218.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.218.mp4
Data
FUNSD