DLUE: Benchmarking Document Language Understanding
Ruoxi Xu Hongyu Lin Xinyan Guan Xianpei Han Yingfei Sun Le Sun
Understanding documents is central to many real-world tasks but remains a
challenging topic. Unfortunately, there is no well-established consensus on how
to comprehensively evaluate document understanding abilities, which
significantly hinders the fair comparison and measuring the progress of the
field. To benchmark document understanding researches, this paper summarizes
four representative abilities, i.e., document classification, document
structural analysis, document information extraction, and document
transcription. Under the new evaluation framework, we propose \textbf{Document
Language Understanding Evaluation} -- \textbf{DLUE}, a new task suite which
covers a wide-range of tasks in various forms, domains and document genres. We
also systematically evaluate six well-established transformer models on DLUE,
and find that due to the lengthy content, complicated underlying structure and
dispersed knowledge, document understanding is still far from being solved, and
currently there is no neural architecture that dominates all tasks, raising
requirements for a universal document understanding architecture.