Natural language data is inherently noisy, yet standard interpretable models often rely on scalar similarities that obscure the true evidentiary basis of a prediction. This limitation is particularly detrimental to prototype-based classification, where traditional full-alignment mechanisms force non-informative background segments to match informative prototypes, yielding unstable or misleading explanations. To mitigate this, we present SCOUT, a novel paradigm that grounds prototype reasoning in the selective correspondence of discriminative fragments. Concretely, we represent each document as a discrete distribution over span embeddings and employ differentiable Unbalanced Optimal Transport (UOT) to align them with class-specific prototypes. Unlike standard methods, this mechanism enables the model to focus strictly on decisive evidence while leaving irrelevant noise unmatched via geometric mass suppression. To ensure verifiability, we anchor prototype supports to readable training spans, establishing a transparent bridge between input segments and stored knowledge. Comprehensive experiments on seven benchmarks demonstrate that SCOUT yields prototypes focused on semantically significant spans, significantly outperforming traditional rationale extraction and post-hoc attribution methods in terms of faithfulness and stability.

Document-level information extraction (doc-IE) plays a pivotal role in the realm of natural language processing (NLP). This paper embarks on a comprehensive review and discussion of contemporary literature related to doc-IE. In addition, we conduct a thorough error analysis using state-of-the-art algorithms, shedding light on their limitations and remaining challenges for tackling the task of doc-IE. Our findings demonstrate that issues like entity coreference resolution and the lack of robust reasoning significantly hinder the effectiveness of document-level information extraction (doc-IE). Additionally, we uncover new challenges, including labeling noise and relation transitivity. The overarching objective of this survey paper is to provide valuable insights that can empower NLP researchers to further advance the performance of doc-IE.