PDFTriage: Question Answering over Long, Structured Documents
Authors: name: Jon Saad-Falcon; name: Joe Barrow; name: Alexa Siu; name: Ani Nenkova; name: Ryan A. Rossi; name: Franck Dernoncourt
Published: 2023-09-16 04:29:05

Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have issues with document question answering
(QA) in situations where the document is unable to fit in the small context
length of an LLM. To overcome this issue, most existing works focus on
retrieving the relevant context from the document, representing them as plain
text. However, documents such as PDFs, web pages, and presentations are
naturally structured with different pages, tables, sections, and so on.
Representing such structured documents as plain text is incongruous with the
user's mental model of these documents with rich structure. When a system has
to query the document for context, this incongruity is brought to the fore, and
seemingly trivial questions can trip up the QA system. To bridge this
fundamental gap in handling structured documents, we propose an approach called
PDFTriage that enables models to retrieve the context based on either structure
or content. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed
PDFTriage-augmented models across several classes of questions where existing
retrieval-augmented LLMs fail. To facilitate further research on this
fundamental problem, we release our benchmark dataset consisting of 900+
human-generated questions over 80 structured documents from 10 different
categories of question types for document QA.