Information in industry, research, and the public sector is widely stored as
rendered documents (e.g., PDF files, scans). Hence, to enable downstream tasks,
systems are needed that map rendered documents onto a structured hierarchical
format. However, existing systems for this task are limited by heuristics and
are not end-to-end trainable. In this work, we introduce the Document Structure
Generator (DSG), a novel system for document parsing that is fully end-to-end
trainable. DSG combines a deep neural network for parsing (i) entities in
documents (e.g., figures, text blocks, headers, etc.) and (ii) relations that
capture the sequence and nested structure between entities. Unlike existing
systems that rely on heuristics, our DSG is trained end-to-end, making it
effective and flexible for real-world applications. We further contribute a
new, large-scale dataset called E-Periodica comprising real-world magazines
with complex document structures for evaluation. Our results demonstrate that
our DSG outperforms commercial OCR tools and, on top of that, achieves
state-of-the-art performance. To the best of our knowledge, our DSG system is
the first end-to-end trainable system for hierarchical document parsing.

在这项研究中，我们介绍了一种名为 DSG 的文档解析系统，它是一种全面可训练的端到端系统，用于将渲染文档映射到结构化的分层格式。我们通过训练 DSG 系统，使其在实际应用中具有高效和灵活的功能，并在评估中证明 DSG 优于商业 OCR 工具并且达到了最先进的性能水平。据我们所知，我们的 DSG 系统是第一个进行层次化文档解析的全面可训练系统。