Large Language Model and Formal Concept Analysis: a comparative study for Topic Modeling

Topic modeling is a research field finding increasing applications: historically from document retrieving, to sentiment analysis and text summarization. Large Language Models (LLM) are currently a major trend in text processing, but few works study their usefulness for this task. Formal Concept Analysis (FCA) has recently been presented as a candidate for topic modeling, but no real applied case study has been conducted. In this work, we compare LLM and FCA to better understand their strengths and weakneses in the topic modeling field. FCA is evaluated through the CREA pipeline used in past experiments on topic modeling and visualization, whereas GPT-5 is used for the LLM. A strategy based on three prompts is applied with GPT-5 in a zero-shot setup: topic generation from document batches, merging of batch results into final topics, and topic labeling. A first experiment reuses the teaching materials previously used to evaluate CREA, while a second experiment analyzes 40 research articles in information systems to compare the extracted topics with the underling subfields.

Inferential Question Answering

Despite extensive research on a wide range of question answering (QA) systems, most existing work focuses on answer containment-i.e., assuming that answers can be directly extracted and/or generated from documents in the corpus. However, some questions require inference, i.e., deriving answers that are not explicitly stated but can be inferred from the available information. We introduce Inferential QA -- a new task that challenges models to infer answers from answer-supporting passages which provide only clues. To study this problem, we construct QUIT (QUestions requiring Inference from Texts) dataset, comprising 7,401 questions and 2.4M passages built from high-convergence human- and machine-authored hints, labeled across three relevance levels using LLM-based answerability and human verification. Through comprehensive evaluation of retrievers, rerankers, and LLM-based readers, we show that methods effective on traditional QA tasks struggle in inferential QA: retrievers underperform, rerankers offer limited gains, and fine-tuning provides inconsistent improvements. Even reasoning-oriented LLMs fail to outperform smaller general-purpose models. These findings reveal that current QA pipelines are not yet ready for inference-based reasoning. Inferential QA thus establishes a new class of QA tasks that move towards understanding and reasoning from indirect textual evidence.

Toward Autonomous Laboratory Safety Monitoring with Vision Language Models: Learning to See Hazards Through Scene Structure

Laboratories are prone to severe injuries from minor unsafe actions, yet continuous safety monitoring -- beyond mandatory pre-lab safety training -- is limited by human availability. Vision language models (VLMs) offer promise for autonomous laboratory safety monitoring, but their effectiveness in realistic settings is unclear due to the lack of visual evaluation data, as most safety incidents are documented primarily as unstructured text. To address this gap, we first introduce a structured data generation pipeline that converts textual laboratory scenarios into aligned triples of (image, scene graph, ground truth), using large language models as scene graph architects and image generation models as renderers. Our experiments on the synthetic dataset of 1,207 samples across 362 unique scenarios and seven open- and closed-source models show that VLMs perform effectively given textual scene graph, but degrade substantially in visual-only settings indicating difficulty in extracting structured object relationships directly from pixels. To overcome this, we propose a post-training context-engineering approach, scene-graph-guided alignment, to bridge perceptual gaps in VLMs by translating visual inputs into structured scene graphs better aligned with VLM reasoning, improving hazard detection performance in visual only settings.

MiNER: A Two-Stage Pipeline for Metadata Extraction from Municipal Meeting Minutes

Municipal meeting minutes are official documents of local governance, exhibiting heterogeneous formats and writing styles. Effective information retrieval (IR) requires identifying metadata such as meeting number, date, location, participants, and start/end times, elements that are rarely standardized or easy to extract automatically. Existing named entity recognition (NER) models are ill-suited to this task, as they are not adapted to such domain-specific categories. In this paper, we propose a two-stage pipeline for metadata extraction from municipal minutes. First, a question answering (QA) model identifies the opening and closing text segments containing metadata. Transformer-based models (BERTimbau and XLM-RoBERTa with and without a CRF layer) are then applied for fine-grained entity extraction and enhanced through deslexicalization. To evaluate our proposed pipeline, we benchmark both open-weight (Phi) and closed-weight (Gemini) LLMs, assessing predictive performance, inference cost, and carbon footprint. Our results demonstrate strong in-domain performance, better than larger general-purpose LLMs. However, cross-municipality evaluation reveals reduced generalization reflecting the variability and linguistic complexity of municipal records. This work establishes the first benchmark for metadata extraction from municipal meeting minutes, providing a solid foundation for future research in this domain.

OCRVerse: Towards Holistic OCR in End-to-End Vision-Language Models

The development of large vision language models drives the demand for managing, and applying massive amounts of multimodal data, making OCR technology, which extracts information from visual images, increasingly popular. However, existing OCR methods primarily focus on recognizing text elements from images or scanned documents (\textbf{Text-centric OCR}), neglecting the identification of visual elements from visually information-dense image sources (\textbf{Vision-centric OCR}), such as charts, web pages and science plots. In reality, these visually information-dense images are widespread on the internet and have significant real-world application value, such as data visualization and web page analysis. In this technical report, we propose \textbf{OCRVerse}, the first holistic OCR method in end-to-end manner that enables unified text-centric OCR and vision-centric OCR. To this end, we constructe comprehensive data engineering to cover a wide range of text-centric documents, such as newspapers, magazines and books, as well as vision-centric rendered composites, including charts, web pages and scientific plots. Moreover, we propose a two-stage SFT-RL multi-domain training method for OCRVerse. SFT directly mixes cross-domain data to train and establish initial domain knowledge, while RL focuses on designing personalized reward strategies for the characteristics of each domain. Specifically, since different domains require various output formats and expected outputs, we provide sufficient flexibility in the RL stage to customize flexible reward signals for each domain, thereby improving cross-domain fusion and avoiding data conflicts. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of OCRVerse, achieving competitive results across text-centric and vision-centric data types, even comparable to large-scale open-source and closed-source models.

Youtu-Parsing: Perception, Structuring and Recognition via High-Parallelism Decoding

This paper presents Youtu-Parsing, an efficient and versatile document parsing model designed for high-performance content extraction. The architecture employs a native Vision Transformer (ViT) featuring a dynamic-resolution visual encoder to extract shared document features, coupled with a prompt-guided Youtu-LLM-2B language model for layout analysis and region-prompted decoding. Leveraging this decoupled and feature-reusable framework, we introduce a high-parallelism decoding strategy comprising two core components: token parallelism and query parallelism. The token parallelism strategy concurrently generates up to 64 candidate tokens per inference step, which are subsequently validated through a verification mechanism. This approach yields a 5--11x speedup over traditional autoregressive decoding and is particularly well-suited for highly structured scenarios, such as table recognition. To further exploit the advantages of region-prompted decoding, the query parallelism strategy enables simultaneous content prediction for multiple bounding boxes (up to five), providing an additional 2x acceleration while maintaining output quality equivalent to standard decoding. Youtu-Parsing encompasses a diverse range of document elements, including text, formulas, tables, charts, seals, and hierarchical structures. Furthermore, the model exhibits strong robustness when handling rare characters, multilingual text, and handwritten content. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that Youtu-Parsing achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both the OmniDocBench and olmOCR-bench benchmarks. Overall, Youtu-Parsing demonstrates significant experimental value and practical utility for large-scale document intelligence applications.

CitiLink: Enhancing Municipal Transparency and Citizen Engagement through Searchable Meeting Minutes

City council minutes are typically lengthy and formal documents with a bureaucratic writing style. Although publicly available, their structure often makes it difficult for citizens or journalists to efficiently find information. In this demo, we present CitiLink, a platform designed to transform unstructured municipal meeting minutes into structured and searchable data, demonstrating how NLP and IR can enhance the accessibility and transparency of local government. The system employs LLMs to extract metadata, discussed subjects, and voting outcomes, which are then indexed in a database to support full-text search with BM25 ranking and faceted filtering through a user-friendly interface. The developed system was built over a collection of 120 minutes made available by six Portuguese municipalities. To assess its usability, CitiLink was tested through guided sessions with municipal personnel, providing insights into how real users interact with the system. In addition, we evaluated Gemini's performance in extracting relevant information from the minutes, highlighting its effectiveness in data extraction.

Typhoon OCR: Open Vision-Language Model For Thai Document Extraction

Document extraction is a core component of digital workflows, yet existing vision-language models (VLMs) predominantly favor high-resource languages. Thai presents additional challenges due to script complexity from non-latin letters, the absence of explicit word boundaries, and the prevalence of highly unstructured real-world documents, limiting the effectiveness of current open-source models. This paper presents Typhoon OCR, an open VLM for document extraction tailored for Thai and English. The model is fine-tuned from vision-language backbones using a Thai-focused training dataset. The dataset is developed using a multi-stage data construction pipeline that combines traditional OCR, VLM-based restructuring, and curated synthetic data. Typhoon OCR is a unified framework capable of text transcription, layout reconstruction, and document-level structural consistency. The latest iteration of our model, Typhoon OCR V1.5, is a compact and inference-efficient model designed to reduce reliance on metadata and simplify deployment. Comprehensive evaluations across diverse Thai document categories, including financial reports, government forms, books, infographics, and handwritten documents, show that Typhoon OCR achieves performance comparable to or exceeding larger frontier proprietary models, despite substantially lower computational cost. The results demonstrate that open vision-language OCR models can achieve accurate text extraction and layout reconstruction for Thai documents, reaching performance comparable to proprietary systems while remaining lightweight and deployable.

PDFInspect: A Unified Feature Extraction Framework for Malicious Document Detection

The increasing prevalence of malicious Portable Document Format (PDF) files necessitates robust and comprehensive feature extraction techniques for effective detection and analysis. This work presents a unified framework that integrates graph-based, structural, and metadata-driven analysis to generate a rich feature representation for each PDF document. The system extracts text from PDF pages and constructs undirected graphs based on pairwise word relationships, enabling the computation of graph-theoretic features such as node count, edge density, and clustering coefficient. Simultaneously, the framework parses embedded metadata to quantify character distributions, entropy patterns, and inconsistencies across fields such as author, title, and producer. Temporal features are derived from creation and modification timestamps to capture behavioral signatures, while structural elements including, object streams, fonts, and embedded images, are quantified to reflect document complexity. Boolean flags for potentially malicious PDF constructs (e.g., JavaScript, launch actions) are also extracted. Together, these features form a high-dimensional vector representation (170 dimensions) that is well-suited for downstream tasks such as malware classification, anomaly detection, and forensic analysis. The proposed approach is scalable, extensible, and designed to support real-world PDF threat intelligence workflows.6

Taxonomy-Aligned Risk Extraction from 10-K Filings with Autonomous Improvement Using LLMs

We present a methodology for extracting structured risk factors from corporate 10-K filings while maintaining adherence to a predefined hierarchical taxonomy. Our three-stage pipeline combines LLM extraction with supporting quotes, embedding-based semantic mapping to taxonomy categories, and LLM-as-a-judge validation that filters spurious assignments. To evaluate our approach, we extract 10,688 risk factors from S&P 500 companies and examine risk profile similarity across industry clusters. Beyond extraction, we introduce autonomous taxonomy maintenance where an AI agent analyzes evaluation feedback to identify problematic categories, diagnose failure patterns, and propose refinements, achieving 104.7% improvement in embedding separation in a case study. External validation confirms the taxonomy captures economically meaningful structure: same-industry companies exhibit 63% higher risk profile similarity than cross-industry pairs (Cohen's d=1.06, AUC 0.82, p<0.001). The methodology generalizes to any domain requiring taxonomy-aligned extraction from unstructured text, with autonomous improvement enabling continuous quality maintenance and enhancement as systems process more documents.