Publications

Lazy-k: Decoding for Constrained Information Extraction

Published in Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2023

We explore the possibility of improving probabilistic models in structured prediction. Specifically, we combine the models with constrained decoding approaches in the context of token classification for information extraction. The decoding methods search for constraintsatisfying label-assignments while maximizing the total probability. To do this, we evaluate several existing approaches, as well as propose a novel decoding method called Lazy-k. Our findings demonstrate that constrained decoding approaches can significantly improve the models’ performances, especially when using smaller models. The Lazy-k approach allows for more flexibility between decoding time and accuracy. The code for using Lazy-k decoding can be found here: https://github.com/ArthurDevNL/lazyk.

Recommended citation: Hemmer, Arthur, Mickaël Coustaty, Nicola Bartolo, Jérôme Brachat, and Jean-Marc Ogier. "Lazy-k Decoding: Constrained Decoding for Information Extraction." In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pp. 6727-6736. 2023. https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.416

Estimating Post-OCR Denoising Complexity on Numerical Texts

Published in Communications in Computer and Information Science, Volume 1863, 2023

Post-OCR processing has significantly improved over the past few years. However, these have been primarily beneficial for texts consisting of natural, alphabetical words, as opposed to documents of numerical nature such as invoices, payslips, medical certificates, etc. To evaluate the OCR post-processing difficulty of these datasets, we propose a method to estimate the denoising complexity of a text and evaluate it on several datasets of varying nature, and show that texts of numerical nature have a significant disadvantage. We evaluate the estimated complexity ranking with respect to the error rates of modern-day denoising approaches to show the validity of our estimator.

Recommended citation: Arthur Hemmer, Jérôme Brachat, Mickaël Coustaty, Jean-Marc Ogier. (2023). "Estimating Post-OCR Denoising Complexity on Numerical Texts." Communications in Computer and Information Science, Volume 1863. https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.01020