Extracting key information from documents, such as receipts or invoices, and preserving the interested texts to structured data is crucial in the document-intensive streamline processes of office automation in areas that includes but not limited to accounting, financial, and taxation areas. To avoid designing expert rules for each specific type of document, some published works attempt to tackle the problem by learning a model to explore the semantic context in text sequences based on the Named Entity Recognition (NER) method in the NLP field. In this paper, we propose to harness the effective information from both semantic meaning and spatial distribution of texts in documents. Specifically, our proposed model, Convolutional Universal Text Information Extractor (CUTIE), applies convolutional neural networks on gridded texts where texts are embedded as features with semantical connotations. We further explore the effect of employing different structures of convolutional neural network and propose a fast and portable structure. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on a dataset with up to @math labelled receipts, without any pre-training or post-processing, achieving state of the art performance that is much higher than BERT but with only @math parameters and without requiring the @math M word dataset for pre-training. Experimental results also demonstrate that the CUTIE being able to achieve state of the art performance with much smaller amount of training data.
Although the internet offers a wide-spread platform for information interchange, day-to-day work in large companies still means the processing of tens of thousands of printed documents every day. This paper presents the system smartFIX which is a document analysis and understanding system developed by the DFKI spin-off INSIDERS. It permits the processing of documents ranging from fixed format forms to unstructured letters of any format. Apart from the architecture, the main components and system characteristics, we also show some results when applying smartFIX to medical bills and prescriptions. Archiving official written documents such as invoices, reminders and account statements in business and private area gets more and more important. Creating appropriate index entries for document archives like sender's name, creation date or document number is a tedious manual work. We present a novel approach to handle automatic indexing of documents based on generic positional extraction of index terms. For this purpose we apply the knowledge of document templates stored in a common full text search index to find index positions that were successfully extracted in the past. Automatic information extraction from scanned business documents is especially valuable in the application domain of document archiving. But current systems for automated document processing still require a lot of configuration work that can only be done by experienced users or administrators. We present an approach for information extraction which purely builds on end-user provided training examples and intentionally omits efficient known extraction techniques like rule based extraction that require intense training and or information extraction expertise. Our evaluation on a large corpus of business documents shows competitive results of above 85 F1-measure on 10 commonly used fields like document type, sender, receiver and date. The system is deployed and used inside the commercial document management system DocuWare.