Noise-Aware Named Entity Recognition for Historical VET Documents

This paper addresses Named Entity Recognition (NER) in the domain of Vocational Education and Training (VET), focusing on historical, digitized documents that suffer from OCR-induced noise. We propose a robust NER approach leveraging Noise-Aware Training (NAT) with synthetically injected OCR errors, transfer learning, and multi-stage fine-tuning. Three complementary strategies, training on noisy, clean, and artificial data, are systematically compared. Our method is one of the first to recognize multiple entity types in VET documents. It is applied to German documents but transferable to arbitrary languages. Experimental results demonstrate that domain-specific and noise-aware fine-tuning substantially increases robustness and accuracy under noisy conditions. We provide publicly available code for reproducible noise-aware NER in domain-specific contexts.

Tab.IAIS: Flexible Table Recognition and Semantic Interpretation System

Table extraction is an important but still unsolved problem. In this paper, we introduce a flexible end-to-end table extraction system. We develop two rule-based algorithms that perform the complete table recognition process and support the most frequent table formats found in the scientific literature. Moreover, to incorporate the extraction of semantic information into the table recognition process, we develop a graph-based table interpretation method. We conduct extensive experiments on the challenging table recognition benchmarks ICDAR 2013 and ICDAR 2019. Our table recognition approach achieves results competitive with state-of-the-art approaches. Moreover, our complete information extraction system exhibited a high F1 score of 0.7380 proving the utility of our approach.