# From Surface to Semantics: Semantic Structure Parsing for Table-Centric Document Analysis

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10311 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.10311/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 49 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1907.11692/) (2019)
- [Faster R-CNN: Towards Real-Time Object Detection with Region Proposal Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1506.01497/) (2015)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [Deformable DETR: Deformable Transformers for End-to-End Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04159/) (2020)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Survey of Hallucination in Natural Language Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03629/) (2022)
- [LayoutLMv3: Pre-training for Document AI with Unified Text and Image Masking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.08387/) (2022)
- [OCR-free Document Understanding Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.15664/) (2021)
- [PubLayNet: largest dataset ever for document layout analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07836/) (2019)
- [DocFormer: End-to-End Transformer for Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.11539/) (2021)
- [MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01523/) (2024)
- [Unifying Vision, Text, and Layout for Universal Document Processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.02623/) (2022)
- [PubTables-1M: Towards comprehensive table extraction from unstructured documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00061/) (2021)
- [TableBank: A Benchmark Dataset for Table Detection and Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.01949/) (2019)
- [Revisiting Relation Extraction in the era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05003/) (2023)
- [CascadeTabNet: An approach for end to end table detection and structure recognition from image-based documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.12629/) (2020)
- [TableFormer: Table Structure Understanding with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.01017/) (2022)
- [Document-level Relation Extraction as Semantic Segmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.03618/) (2021)
- [OmniParser: A Unified Framework for Text Spotting, Key Information Extraction and Table Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.19128/) (2024)
- [TabPedia: Towards Comprehensive Visual Table Understanding with Concept Synergy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01326/) (2024)
- [Studying the Usage of Text-To-Text Transfer Transformer to Support Code-Related Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.02017/) (2021)
- [XYLayoutLM: Towards Layout-Aware Multimodal Networks For Visually-Rich Document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.06947/) (2022)
- [GPT-RE: In-context Learning for Relation Extraction using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.02105/) (2023)
- [Improving Table Structure Recognition with Visual-Alignment Sequential Coordinate Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.06949/) (2023)
- [Modeling Entities as Semantic Points for Visual Information Extraction in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.13095/) (2023)
- [Attention Where It Matters: Rethinking Visual Document Understanding with Selective Region Concentration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01131/) (2023)
- [Beyond Binary: Towards Fine-Grained LLM-Generated Text Detection via Role Recognition and Involvement Measurement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.14259/) (2024)
- [Will LLMs Replace the Encoder-Only Models in Temporal Relation Classification?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.10476/) (2024)
- [TC-OCR: TableCraft OCR for Efficient Detection & Recognition of Table Structure & Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10305/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Documents are core carriers of information and knowl-edge, with broad applications in finance, healthcare, and scientific research. Tables, as the main medium for structured data, encapsulate key information and are among the most critical document components. Existing studies largely focus on surface-level tasks such as layout analysis, table detection, and data extraction, lacking deep semantic parsing of tables and their contextual associations. This limits advanced tasks like cross-paragraph data interpretation and context-consistent analysis. To address this, we propose DOTABLER, a table-centric semantic document parsing framework designed to uncover deep semantic links between tables and their context. DOTABLER leverages a custom dataset and domain-specific fine-tuning of pre-trained models, integrating a complete parsing pipeline to identify context segments semantically tied to tables. Built on this semantic understanding, DOTABLER implements two core functionalities: table-centric document structure parsing and domain-specific table retrieval, delivering comprehensive table-anchored semantic analysis and precise extraction of semantically relevant tables. Evaluated on nearly 4,000 pages with over 1,000 tables from real-world PDFs, DOTABLER achieves over 90% Precision and F1 scores, demonstrating superior performance in table-context semantic analysis and deep document parsing compared to advanced models such as GPT-4o.