Zilong Wang


2022

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Towards Few-shot Entity Recognition in Document Images: A Label-aware Sequence-to-Sequence Framework
Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2022

Entity recognition is a fundamental task in understanding document images. Traditional sequence labeling frameworks treat the entity types as class IDs and rely on extensive data and high-quality annotations to learn semantics which are typically expensive in practice. In this paper, we aim to build an entity recognition model requiring only a few shots of annotated document images. To overcome the data limitation, we propose to leverage the label surface names to better inform the model of the target entity type semantics and also embed the labels into the spatial embedding space to capture the spatial correspondence between regions and labels. Specifically, we go beyond sequence labeling and develop a novel label-aware seq2seq framework, LASER. The proposed model follows a new labeling scheme that generates the label surface names word-by-word explicitly after generating the entities. During training, LASER refines the label semantics by updating the label surface name representations and also strengthens the label-region correlation. In this way, LASER recognizes the entities from document images through both semantic and layout correspondence. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of LASER under the few-shot setting.

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Formulating Few-shot Fine-tuning Towards Language Model Pre-training: A Pilot Study on Named Entity Recognition
Zihan Wang | Kewen Zhao | Zilong Wang | Jingbo Shang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Fine-tuning pre-trained language models is a common practice in building NLP models for various tasks, including the case with less supervision. We argue that under the few-shot setting, formulating fine-tuning closer to the pre-training objective shall be able to unleash more benefits from the pre-trained language models. In this work, we take few-shot named entity recognition (NER) for a pilot study, where existing fine-tuning strategies are much different from pre-training. We propose a novel few-shot fine-tuning framework for NER, FFF-NER. Specifically, we introduce three new types of tokens, “is-entity”, “which-type” and “bracket”, so we can formulate the NER fine-tuning as (masked) token prediction or generation, depending on the choice of the pre-training objective. In our experiments, we apply to fine-tune both BERT and BART for few-shot NER on several benchmark datasets and observe significant improvements over existing fine-tuning strategies, including sequence labeling, prototype meta-learning, and prompt-based approaches. We further perform a series of ablation studies, showing few-shot NER performance is strongly correlated with the similarity between fine-tuning and pre-training.

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MGDoc: Pre-training with Multi-granular Hierarchy for Document Image Understanding
Zilong Wang | Jiuxiang Gu | Chris Tensmeyer | Nikolaos Barmpalios | Ani Nenkova | Tong Sun | Jingbo Shang | Vlad Morariu
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Document images are a ubiquitous source of data where the text is organized in a complex hierarchical structure ranging from fine granularity (e.g., words), medium granularity (e.g., regions such as paragraphs or figures), to coarse granularity (e.g., the whole page). The spatial hierarchical relationships between content at different levels of granularity are crucial for document image understanding tasks. Existing methods learn features from either word-level or region-level but fail to consider both simultaneously. Word-level models are restricted by the fact that they originate from pure-text language models, which only encode the word-level context. In contrast, region-level models attempt to encode regions corresponding to paragraphs or text blocks into a single embedding, but they perform worse with additional word-level features. To deal with these issues, we propose MGDoc, a new multi-modal multi-granular pre-training framework that encodes page-level, region-level, and word-level information at the same time. MGDoc uses a unified text-visual encoder to obtain multi-modal features across different granularities, which makes it possible to project the multi-granular features into the same hyperspace. To model the region-word correlation, we design a cross-granular attention mechanism and specific pre-training tasks for our model to reinforce the model of learning the hierarchy between regions and words. Experiments demonstrate that our proposed model can learn better features that perform well across granularities and lead to improvements in downstream tasks.

2021

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LayoutReader: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Reading Order Detection
Zilong Wang | Yiheng Xu | Lei Cui | Jingbo Shang | Furu Wei
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

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.

2020

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DocStruct: A Multimodal Method to Extract Hierarchy Structure in Document for General Form Understanding
Zilong Wang | Mingjie Zhan | Xuebo Liu | Ding Liang
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2020

Form understanding depends on both textual contents and organizational structure. Although modern OCR performs well, it is still challenging to realize general form understanding because forms are commonly used and of various formats. The table detection and handcrafted features in previous works cannot apply to all forms because of their requirements on formats. Therefore, we concentrate on the most elementary components, the key-value pairs, and adopt multimodal methods to extract features. We consider the form structure as a tree-like or graph-like hierarchy of text fragments. The parent-child relation corresponds to the key-value pairs in forms. We utilize the state-of-the-art models and design targeted extraction modules to extract multimodal features from semantic contents, layout information, and visual images. A hybrid fusion method of concatenation and feature shifting is designed to fuse the heterogeneous features and provide an informative joint representation. We adopt an asymmetric algorithm and negative sampling in our model as well. We validate our method on two benchmarks, MedForm and FUNSD, and extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

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Exploring Semantic Capacity of Terms
Jie Huang | Zilong Wang | Kevin Chang | Wen-mei Hwu | JinJun Xiong
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)

We introduce and study semantic capacity of terms. For example, the semantic capacity of artificial intelligence is higher than that of linear regression since artificial intelligence possesses a broader meaning scope. Understanding semantic capacity of terms will help many downstream tasks in natural language processing. For this purpose, we propose a two-step model to investigate semantic capacity of terms, which takes a large text corpus as input and can evaluate semantic capacity of terms if the text corpus can provide enough co-occurrence information of terms. Extensive experiments in three fields demonstrate the effectiveness and rationality of our model compared with well-designed baselines and human-level evaluations.