Eye-Movements During Information Extraction from Administrative Documents

A key aspect of digital mailroom processes is the extraction of relevant information from administrative documents. More often than not, the extraction process cannot be fully automated, and there is instead an important amount of manual intervention. In this work we study the human process of information extraction from invoice document images. We explore whether the gaze of human annotators during an manual information extraction process could be exploited towards reducing the manual effort and automating the process. To this end, we perform an eye-tracking experiment replicating real-life interfaces for information extraction. Through this pilot study we demonstrate that relevant areas in the document can be identified reliably through automatic fixation classification, and the obtained models generalize well to new subjects. Our findings indicate that it is in principle possible to integrate the human in the document image analysis loop, making use of the scanpath to automate the extraction process or verify extracted information.