In the domain of Document AI, parsing semi-structured image form is a crucial Key Information Extraction (KIE) task. The advent of pre-trained multimodal models significantly empowers Document AI frameworks to extract key information from form documents in different formats such as PDF, Word, and images. Nonetheless, form parsing is still encumbered by notable challenges like subpar capabilities in multilingual parsing and diminished recall in industrial contexts in rich text and rich visuals. In this work, we introduce a simple but effective Multimodal and Multilingual semi-structured FORM PARSER (XFormParser), which is anchored on a comprehensive Transformer-based pre-trained language model and innovatively amalgamates semantic entity recognition (SER) and relation extraction (RE) into a unified framework. Combined with Bi-LSTM, the performance of multilingual parsing is significantly improved. Furthermore, we develop InDFormSFT, a pioneering supervised fine-tuning (SFT) industrial dataset that specifically addresses the parsing needs of forms in a variety of industrial contexts. Through rigorous testing on established benchmarks, XFormParser has demonstrated its unparalleled effectiveness and robustness. Compared to existing state-of-the-art (SOTA) models, XFormParser notably achieves up to 1.79% F1 score improvement on RE tasks in language-specific settings. It also exhibits exceptional improvements in cross-task performance in both multilingual and zero-shot settings.

Traditional dialogue summarization primarily focuses on dialogue content, assuming it comprises adequate information for a clear summary. However, this assumption often fails for discussions grounded in shared background, where participants frequently omit context and use implicit references. This results in summaries that are confusing to readers unfamiliar with the background. To address this, we introduce Knowledge-Grounded Discussion Summarization (KGDS), a novel task that produces a supplementary background summary for context and a clear opinion summary with clarified references. To facilitate research, we construct the first KGDS benchmark, featuring news-discussion pairs and expert-created multi-granularity gold annotations for evaluating sub-summaries. We also propose a novel hierarchical evaluation framework with fine-grained and interpretable metrics. Our extensive evaluation of 12 advanced large language models (LLMs) reveals that KGDS remains a significant challenge. The models frequently miss key facts and retain irrelevant ones in background summarization, and often fail to resolve implicit references in opinion summary integration.

Dialogue summarization involves a wide range of scenarios and domains. However, existing methods generally only apply to specific scenarios or domains. In this study, we propose a new pre-trained model specifically designed for multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue summarization. It adopts a multi-stage pre-training strategy to reduce the gap between the pre-training objective and fine-tuning objective. Specifically, we first conduct domain-aware pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain dialogue data to enhance the adaptability of our pre-trained model. Then, we conduct task-oriented pre-training using large-scale multi-scenario multi-domain “dialogue-summary” parallel data annotated by ChatGPT to enhance the dialogue summarization ability of our pre-trained model. Experimental results on three dialogue summarization datasets from different scenarios and domains indicate that our pre-trained model significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art models in full fine-tuning, zero-shot, and few-shot settings.