Doc2SoarGraph: Discrete Reasoning over Visually-Rich Table-Text Documents via Semantic-Oriented Hierarchical Graphs

AbstractTable-text document (e.g., financial reports) understanding has attracted increasing attention in recent two years. TAT-DQA is a realistic setting for the understanding of visually-rich table-text documents, which involves answering associated questions requiring discrete reasoning. Most existing work relies on token-level semantics, falling short in the reasoning across document elements such as quantities and dates. To address this limitation, we propose a novel Doc2SoarGraph model that exploits element-level semantics and employs Semantic-oriented hierarchical Graph structures to capture the differences and correlations among different elements within the given document and question. Extensive experiments on the TAT-DQA dataset reveal that our model surpasses the state-of-the-art conventional method (i.e., MHST) and large language model (i.e., ChatGPT) by 17.73 and 6.49 points respectively in terms of Exact Match (EM) metric, demonstrating exceptional effectiveness.