A Scalable Framework for Table of Contents Extraction from Complex ESG Annual Reports

Xinyu Wang, Lin Gui, Yulan He

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference paperpeer-review

Abstract

Table of contents (ToC) extraction centres on structuring documents in a hierarchical manner. In this paper, we propose a new dataset, ESGDoc, comprising 1,093 ESG annual reports from 563 companies spanning from 2001 to 2022. These reports pose significant challenges due to their diverse structures and extensive length. To address these challenges, we propose a new framework for Toc extraction, consisting of three steps: (1) Constructing an initial tree of text blocks based on reading order and font sizes; (2) Modelling each tree node (or text block) independently by considering its contextual information captured in node-centric subtree; (3) Modifying the original tree by taking appropriate action on each tree node (Keep, Delete, or Move). This construction-modelling-modification (CMM) process offers several benefits. It eliminates the need for pairwise modelling of section headings as in previous approaches, making document segmentation practically feasible. By incorporating structured information, each section heading can leverage both local and long-distance context relevant to itself. Experimental results show that our approach outperforms the previous state-of-the-art baseline with a fraction of running time. Our framework proves its scalability by effectively handling documents of any length.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationEMNLP 2023 - 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings
EditorsHouda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages13215-13229
Number of pages15
ISBN (Electronic)9798891760608
Publication statusPublished - 2023
Event2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023 - Hybrid, Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 6 Dec 202310 Dec 2023

Publication series

NameEMNLP 2023 - 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings

Conference

Conference2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, EMNLP 2023
Country/TerritorySingapore
CityHybrid, Singapore
Period6/12/202310/12/2023

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