A real-world information extraction (IE) system for semi-structured document
images often involves a long pipeline of multiple modules, whose complexity
dramatically increases its development and maintenance cost. One can instead
consider an end-to-end model that directly maps the input to the target output
and simplify the entire process. However, such generation approach is known to
lead to unstable performance if not designed carefully. Here we present our
recent effort on transitioning from our existing pipeline-based IE system to an
end-to-end system focusing on practical challenges that are associated with
replacing and deploying the system in real, large-scale production. By
carefully formulating document IE as a sequence generation task, we show that a
single end-to-end IE system can be built and still achieve competent
performance.

本文提出了通过将文档信息抽取 (IE) 作为序列生成任务的方式，将现有的基于流水线的 IE 系统转变为端到端系统的尝试，着重解决了大规模实际部署所涉及的实际挑战，并证明了单个端到端 IE 系统仍然能够实现竞争性能。