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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.18073 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.18073/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 20 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 27 Oct 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6980/) (2014)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Graph Attention Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.10903/) (2017)
- [Learning Phrase Representations using RNN Encoder-Decoder for Statistical Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1406.1078/) (2014)
- [How Attentive are Graph Attention Networks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.14491/) (2021)
- [LayoutLM: Pre-training of Text and Layout for Document Image Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.13318/) (2019)
- [LayoutLMv2: Multi-modal Pre-training for Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2012.14740/) (2020)
- [PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07836/) (2019)
- [Image-based table recognition: data, model, and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1911.10683/) (2019)
- [DocBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Document Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.01038/) (2020)
- [DocLayNet: A Large Human-Annotated Dataset for Document-Layout Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.01062/) (2022)
- [LayoutXLM: Multimodal Pre-training for Multilingual Visually-rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08836/) (2021)
- [XYLayoutLM: Towards Layout-Aware Multimodal Networks For Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06947/) (2022)
- [ERNIE-Layout: Layout Knowledge Enhanced Pre-training for Visually-rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.06155/) (2022)
- [FormNet: Structural Encoding beyond Sequential Modeling in Form Document Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08411/) (2022)
- [VSR: A Unified Framework for Document Layout Analysis combining Vision, Semantics and Relations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06220/) (2021)
- [VILA: Improving Structured Content Extraction from Scientific PDFs Using Visual Layout Groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.00676/) (2021)
- [PP-StructureV2: A Stronger Document Analysis System](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.05391/) (2022)
- [FormNetV2: Multimodal Graph Contrastive Learning for Form Document Information Extraction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02549/) (2023)
- [Multimodal Tree Decoder for Table of Contents Extraction in Document Images](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02896/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [Seg2Act: Global Context-aware Action Generation for Document Logical Structuring](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06802/) (2024)
- [EulerESG: Automating ESG Disclosure Analysis with LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.21712/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.