TASER: Table Agents for Schema-guided Extraction and Recommendation

Nicole Cho, Kirsty Fielding, William Watson, Sumitra Ganesh, Manuela Veloso


Abstract
Real-world financial filings report critical information about an entity’s investment holdings, essential for assessing that entity’s risk, profitability, and relationship profile. Yet, these details are often buried in messy, multi-page, fragmented tables that are difficult to parse, hindering downstream QA and data normalization. Specifically, 99.4% of the tables in our financial table dataset lack bounding boxes, with the largest table spanning 44 pages. To address this, we present TASER (Table Agents for Schema-guided Extraction and Recommendation), a continuously learning, agentic table extraction system that converts highly unstructured, multi-page, heterogeneous tables into normalized, schema-conforming outputs. Guided by an initial portfolio schema, TASER executes table detection, classification, extraction, and recommendations in a single pipeline. Our Recommender Agent reviews unmatched outputs and proposes schema revisions, enabling TASER to outperform vision-based table detection models such as Table Transformer by 10.1%. Within this continuous learning process, larger batch sizes yield a 104.3% increase in useful schema recommendations and a 9.8% increase in total extractions. To train TASER, we manually labeled 22,584 pages and 3,213 tables covering 731.7 billion in holdings, culminating in TASERTab to facilitate research on real-world financial tables and structured outputs. Our results highlight the promise of continuously learning agents for robust extractions from complex tabular data.
Anthology ID:
2026.eacl-industry.17
Volume:
Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track)
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Yevgen Matusevych, Gülşen Eryiğit, Nikolaos Aletras
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
226–252
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.17/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Nicole Cho, Kirsty Fielding, William Watson, Sumitra Ganesh, and Manuela Veloso. 2026. TASER: Table Agents for Schema-guided Extraction and Recommendation. In Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 5: Industry Track), pages 226–252, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TASER: Table Agents for Schema-guided Extraction and Recommendation (Cho et al., EACL 2026)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-industry.17.pdf