TWIX: Automatically Reconstructing Structured Data from Templatized Documents

Abstract

Many documents, that we call templatized documents, are programmatically generated by populating fields in a visual template. Effective data extraction from these documents is crucial to supporting downstream analytical tasks. Current data extraction tools often struggle with complex document layouts, incur high latency and/or cost on large datasets, and often require significant human effort, when extracting tables or values given user-specified fields from documents. The key insight of our tool, TWIX, is to predict the underlying template used to create such documents, modeling the visual and structural commonalities across documents. Data extraction based on this predicted template provides a more principled, accurate, and efficient solution at a low cost. Comprehensive evaluations on 34 diverse real-world datasets show that uncovering the template is crucial for data extraction from templatized documents. TWIX achieves over 90% precision and recall on average, outperforming tools from industry. Textract and Azure Document Intelligence, and vision-based LLMs like GPT-4-Vision, by over 25% in precision and recall. TWIX scales easily to large datasets and is 734X faster and 5836X cheaper than vision-based LLMs for extracting data from a large document collection with 817 pages.

Yiming Lin

Postdoctoral Fellow

My research interests include Data Cleaning, Data Preparation, Query Processing, Query Optimization.