Abstract
We address the challenging problem of Natural Language Comprehension beyond plain-text documents by introducing the TILT neural network architecture which simultaneously learns layout information, visual features, and textual semantics. Contrary to previous approaches, we rely on a decoder capable of solving all problems involving natural language. The layout is represented as an attention bias and complemented with contextualized visual information, while the core of our model is a pretrained encoder-decoder Transformer. We trained our network on real-world documents with different layouts, such as tables, figures, and forms. Our novel approach achieves state-of-the-art in extracting information from documents and answering questions, demanding layout understanding (DocVQA, CORD, WikiOps, SROIE). At the same time, we simplify the process by employing an end-to-end model.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.09550