QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework

Zifeng Wang, Zizhao Zhang, Jacob Devlin, Chen-Yu Lee, Guolong Su, Hao Zhang, Jennifer Dy, Vincent Perot, Tomas Pfister


Abstract
Zero-shot transfer learning for document understanding is a crucial yet under-investigated scenario to help reduce the high cost involved in annotating document entities. We present a novel query-based framework, QueryForm, that extracts entity values from form-like documents in a zero-shot fashion. QueryForm contains a dual prompting mechanism that composes both the document schema and a specific entity type into a query, which is used to prompt a Transformer model to perform a single entity extraction task. Furthermore, we propose to leverage large-scale query-entity pairs generated from form-like webpages with weak HTML annotations to pre-train QueryForm. By unifying pre-training and fine-tuning into the same query-based framework, QueryForm enables models to learn from structured documents containing various entities and layouts, leading to better generalization to target document types without the need for target-specific training data. QueryForm sets new state-of-the-art average F1 score on both the XFUND (+4.6% 10.1%) and the Payment (+3.2% 9.5%) zero-shot benchmark, with a smaller model size and no additional image input.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.255
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4146–4159
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.255
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.255
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zifeng Wang, Zizhao Zhang, Jacob Devlin, Chen-Yu Lee, Guolong Su, Hao Zhang, Jennifer Dy, Vincent Perot, and Tomas Pfister. 2023. QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 4146–4159, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
QueryForm: A Simple Zero-shot Form Entity Query Framework (Wang et al., Findings 2023)
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