Abstract: The advent of recurrent neural networks for handwriting recognition marked an important milestone reaching impressive recognition accuracies despite the great variability that we observe across different writing styles. Sequential architectures are a perfect fit to model text lines, not only because of the inherent temporal aspect of text, but also to learn probability distributions over sequences of characters and words. However, using such recurrent paradigms comes at a cost at training stage, since their sequential pipelines prevent parallelization. In this work, we introduce a non-recurrent approach to recognize handwritten text by the use of transformer models. We propose a novel method that bypasses any recurrence. By using multi-head self-attention layers both at the visual and textual stages, we are able to tackle character recognition as well as to learn language-related dependencies of the character sequences to be decoded. Our model is unconstrained to any predefined vocabulary, being able to recognize out-of-vocabulary words, i.e. words that do not appear in the training vocabulary. We significantly advance over prior art and demonstrate that satisfactory recognition accuracies are yielded even in few-shot learning scenarios.

Abstract: This paper provides an overview of the DocILE 2023 Competition, its tasks, participant submissions, the competition results and possible future research directions. This first edition of the competition focused on two Information Extraction tasks, Key Information Localization and Extraction (KILE) and Line Item Recognition (LIR). Both of these tasks require detection of pre-defined categories of information in business documents. The second task additionally requires correctly grouping the information into tuples, capturing the structure laid out in the document. The competition used the recently published DocILE dataset and benchmark that stays open to new submissions. The diversity of the participant solutions indicates the potential of the dataset as the submissions included pure Computer Vision, pure Natural Language Processing, as well as multi-modal solutions and utilized all of the parts of the dataset, including the annotated, synthetic and unlabeled subsets.

Abstract: Optical Music Recognition is the task of transcribing a music score into a machine readable format. Many music scores are written in a single staff, and therefore, they could be treated as a sequence. Therefore, this work explores the use of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) Recurrent Neural Networks for reading the music score sequentially, where the LSTM helps in keeping the context. For training, we have used a synthetic dataset of more than 40000 images, labeled at primitive level

Abstract: In this paper we present a knowledge base of architectural documents aiming at improving existing methods of floor plan classification and understanding. It consists of an ontological definition of the domain and the inclusion of real instances coming from both, automatically interpreted and manually labeled documents. The knowledge base has proven to be an effective tool to structure our knowledge and to easily maintain and upgrade it. Moreover, it is an appropriate means to automatically check the consistency of relational data and a convenient complement of hard-coded knowledge interpretation systems.