Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has made significant progress for Visually Rich Document Understanding (VRDU), especially the fixed-layout documents such as scanned document images. While, there are still a large number of digital documents where the layout information is not fixed and needs to be interactively and dynamically rendered for visualization, making existing layout-based pre-training approaches not easy to apply. In this paper, we propose MarkupLM for document understanding tasks with markup languages as the backbone, such as HTML/XML-based documents, where text and markup information is jointly pre-trained. Experiment results show that the pre-trained MarkupLM significantly outperforms the existing strong baseline models on several document understanding tasks. The pre-trained model and code will be publicly available at https://aka.ms/markuplm.

Multimodal pre-training with text, layout, and image has achieved SOTA performance for visually rich document understanding tasks recently, which demonstrates the great potential for joint learning across different modalities. However, the existed research work has focused only on the English domain while neglecting the importance of multilingual generalization. In this paper, we introduce a human-annotated multilingual form understanding benchmark dataset named XFUND, which includes form understanding samples in 7 languages (Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Portuguese). Meanwhile, we present LayoutXLM, a multimodal pre-trained model for multilingual document understanding, which aims to bridge the language barriers for visually rich document understanding. Experimental results show that the LayoutXLM model has significantly outperformed the existing SOTA cross-lingual pre-trained models on the XFUND dataset. The XFUND dataset and the pre-trained LayoutXLM model have been publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutxlm.

Positional encoding plays a key role in Transformer-based architecture, which is to indicate and embed token sequential order information. Understanding documents with unreliable reading order information is a real challenge for document Transformer models. This paper proposes a simple and effective positional encoding method, learnable sinusoidal positional encoding (LSPE), by building a learnable sinusoidal positional encoding feed-forward network. We apply LSPE to document Transformer models and pretrain them on document datasets. Then we finetune and evaluate the model performance on document understanding tasks in form, receipt, and invoice domains. Experimental results show our proposed method not only outperforms other baselines, but also demonstrates its robustness and stability on handling noisy data with incorrect order information.

Pre-training of text and layout has proved effective in a variety of visually-rich document understanding tasks due to its effective model architecture and the advantage of large-scale unlabeled scanned/digital-born documents. We propose LayoutLMv2 architecture with new pre-training tasks to model the interaction among text, layout, and image in a single multi-modal framework. Specifically, with a two-stream multi-modal Transformer encoder, LayoutLMv2 uses not only the existing masked visual-language modeling task but also the new text-image alignment and text-image matching tasks, which make it better capture the cross-modality interaction in the pre-training stage. Meanwhile, it also integrates a spatial-aware self-attention mechanism into the Transformer architecture so that the model can fully understand the relative positional relationship among different text blocks. Experiment results show that LayoutLMv2 outperforms LayoutLM by a large margin and achieves new state-of-the-art results on a wide variety of downstream visually-rich document understanding tasks, including FUNSD (0.7895 to 0.8420), CORD (0.9493 to 0.9601), SROIE (0.9524 to 0.9781), Kleister-NDA (0.8340 to 0.8520), RVL-CDIP (0.9443 to 0.9564), and DocVQA (0.7295 to 0.8672).

Reading order detection is the cornerstone to understanding visually-rich documents (e.g., receipts and forms). Unfortunately, no existing work took advantage of advanced deep learning models because it is too laborious to annotate a large enough dataset. We observe that the reading order of WORD documents is embedded in their XML metadata; meanwhile, it is easy to convert WORD documents to PDFs or images. Therefore, in an automated manner, we construct ReadingBank, a benchmark dataset that contains reading order, text, and layout information for 500,000 document images covering a wide spectrum of document types. This first-ever large-scale dataset unleashes the power of deep neural networks for reading order detection. Specifically, our proposed LayoutReader captures the text and layout information for reading order prediction using the seq2seq model. It performs almost perfectly in reading order detection and significantly improves both open-source and commercial OCR engines in ordering text lines in their results in our experiments. The dataset and models are publicly available at https://aka.ms/layoutreader.

We present TableBank, a new image-based table detection and recognition dataset built with novel weak supervision from Word and Latex documents on the internet. Existing research for image-based table detection and recognition usually fine-tunes pre-trained models on out-of-domain data with a few thousand human-labeled examples, which is difficult to generalize on real-world applications. With TableBank that contains 417K high quality labeled tables, we build several strong baselines using state-of-the-art models with deep neural networks. We make TableBank publicly available and hope it will empower more deep learning approaches in the table detection and recognition task. The dataset and models can be downloaded from https://github.com/doc-analysis/TableBank.

Document layout analysis usually relies on computer vision models to understand documents while ignoring textual information that is vital to capture. Meanwhile, high quality labeled datasets with both visual and textual information are still insufficient. In this paper, we present DocBank, a benchmark dataset that contains 500K document pages with fine-grained token-level annotations for document layout analysis. DocBank is constructed using a simple yet effective way with weak supervision from the LaTeX documents available on the arXiv.com. With DocBank, models from different modalities can be compared fairly and multi-modal approaches will be further investigated and boost the performance of document layout analysis. We build several strong baselines and manually split train/dev/test sets for evaluation. Experiment results show that models trained on DocBank accurately recognize the layout information for a variety of documents. The DocBank dataset is publicly available at https://github.com/doc-analysis/DocBank.

Fine-tuning with pre-trained language models (e.g. BERT) has achieved great success in many language understanding tasks in supervised settings (e.g. text classification). However, relatively little work has been focused on applying pre-trained models in unsupervised settings, such as text clustering. In this paper, we propose a novel method to fine-tune pre-trained models unsupervisedly for text clustering, which simultaneously learns text representations and cluster assignments using a clustering oriented loss. Experiments on three text clustering datasets (namely TREC-6, Yelp, and DBpedia) show that our model outperforms the baseline methods and achieves state-of-the-art results.

Most machine reading comprehension (MRC) models separately handle encoding and matching with different network architectures. In contrast, pretrained language models with Transformer layers, such as GPT (Radford et al., 2018) and BERT (Devlin et al., 2018), have achieved competitive performance on MRC. A research question that naturally arises is: apart from the benefits of pre-training, how many performance gain comes from the unified network architecture. In this work, we evaluate and analyze unifying encoding and matching components with Transformer for the MRC task. Experimental results on SQuAD show that the unified model outperforms previous networks that separately treat encoding and matching. We also introduce a metric to inspect whether a Transformer layer tends to perform encoding or matching. The analysis results show that the unified model learns different modeling strategies compared with previous manually-designed models.

Dialogue systems are usually built on either generation-based or retrieval-based approaches, yet they do not benefit from the advantages of different models. In this paper, we propose a Retrieval-Enhanced Adversarial Training (REAT) method for neural response generation. Distinct from existing approaches, the REAT method leverages an encoder-decoder framework in terms of an adversarial training paradigm, while taking advantage of N-best response candidates from a retrieval-based system to construct the discriminator. An empirical study on a large scale public available benchmark dataset shows that the REAT method significantly outperforms the vanilla Seq2Seq model as well as the conventional adversarial training approach.

This paper proposes to study fine-grained coordinated cross-lingual text stream alignment through a novel information network decipherment paradigm. We use Burst Information Networks as media to represent text streams and present a simple yet effective network decipherment algorithm with diverse clues to decipher the networks for accurate text stream alignment. Experiments on Chinese-English news streams show our approach not only outperforms previous approaches on bilingual lexicon extraction from coordinated text streams but also can harvest high-quality alignments from large amounts of streaming data for endless language knowledge mining, which makes it promising to be a new paradigm for automatic language knowledge acquisition.

Conventional Open Information Extraction (Open IE) systems are usually built on hand-crafted patterns from other NLP tools such as syntactic parsing, yet they face problems of error propagation. In this paper, we propose a neural Open IE approach with an encoder-decoder framework. Distinct from existing methods, the neural Open IE approach learns highly confident arguments and relation tuples bootstrapped from a state-of-the-art Open IE system. An empirical study on a large benchmark dataset shows that the neural Open IE system significantly outperforms several baselines, while maintaining comparable computational efficiency.

Retrospective event detection is an important task for discovering previously unidentified events in a text stream. In this paper, we propose two fast centroid-aware event detection models based on a novel text stream representation – Burst Information Networks (BINets) for addressing the challenge. The BINets are time-aware, efficient and can be easily analyzed for identifying key information (centroids). These advantages allow the BINet-based approaches to achieve the state-of-the-art performance on multiple datasets, demonstrating the efficacy of BINets for the task of event detection.