DocAnnot -- Accelerating the Creation of Key Information Extraction Datasets with GenAI-Powered Auto-annotation

Key Information Extraction (KIE) is vital for many document applications, but creating training datasets is traditionally a time-consuming manual process. We introduce DocAnnot, a framework that significantly accelerates KIE dataset generation. DocAnnot leverages a Large Vision Language Model (LVLM) for label value extraction, OCR for text/bounding box detection, and a novel Spatially Informed Contextual Matching (SICM) algorithm. SICM improves label-value association by combining spatial relationships and proximity analysis with textual matching. We evaluate our framework on the CORD and SROIE benchmarks, demonstrating its ability to auto-generate annotations with F1-scores of 0.679 and 0.846, respectively. Furthermore, we investigate the effectiveness of using auto-annotated data for fine-tuning downstream KIE models. While human-annotated data remains superior, models trained exclusively on DocAnnot's outputs attain respectable performance (e.g., LayoutLMv3 achieving an F1-score of 0.6765 on CORD). These results show that while our framework significantly reduces reliance on manual effort, it does not yet fully eliminate the need for human intervention. However, by automating the process to a point where reviewers can efficiently refine outputs, our system enables near-perfect annotations with much greater efficiency than manual annotation from scratch. This approach offers substantial time and cost savings, making it valuable for resource-constrained settings and rapid model prototyping.