This paper presents a groundbreaking multimodal, multi-task, multi-teacher joint-grained knowledge distillation model for visually-rich form document understanding. The model is designed to leverage insights from both fine-grained and coarse-grained levels by facilitating a nuanced correlation between token and entity representations, addressing the complexities inherent in form documents. Additionally, we introduce new inter-grained and cross-grained loss functions to further refine diverse multi-teacher knowledge distillation transfer process, presenting distribution gaps and a harmonised understanding of form documents. Through a comprehensive evaluation across publicly available form document understanding datasets, our proposed model consistently outperforms existing baselines, showcasing its efficacy in handling the intricate structures and content of visually complex form documents.

Recognizing the layout of unstructured digital documents is crucial when parsing the documents into the structured, machine-readable format for downstream applications. Recent studies in Document Layout Analysis usually rely on visual cues to understand documents while ignoring other information, such as contextual information or the relationships between document layout components, which are vital to boost better layout analysis performance. Our Doc-GCN presents an effective way to harmonize and integrate heterogeneous aspects for Document Layout Analysis. We construct different graphs to capture the four main features aspects of document layout components, including syntactic, semantic, density, and appearance features. Then, we apply graph convolutional networks to enhance each aspect of features and apply the node-level pooling for integration. Finally, we concatenate features of all aspects and feed them into the 2-layer MLPs for document layout component classification. Our Doc-GCN achieves state-of-the-art results on three widely used DLA datasets: PubLayNet, FUNSD, and DocBank. The code will be released at https://github.com/adlnlp/doc_gcn

Drug-drug interaction (DDI) may leads to adverse reactions in patients, thus it is important to extract such knowledge from biomedical texts. However, previously proposed approaches typically focus on capturing sentence-aspect information while ignoring valuable knowledge concerning the whole corpus. In this paper, we propose a Multi-aspect Graph-based DDI extraction model, named DDI-MuG. We first employ a bio-specific pre-trained language model to obtain the token contextualized representations. Then we use two graphs to get syntactic information from input instance and word co-occurrence information within the entire corpus, respectively. Finally, we combine the representations of drug entities and verb tokens for the final classification. It is encouraging to see that the proposed model outperforms all baseline models on two benchmark datasets. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first model that explores multi-aspect graphs to the DDI extraction task, and we hope it can establish a foundation for more robust multi-aspect works in the future.