Peacemaker at ATE-IT: Automatic term extraction from Italian text for waste management data using encoder model

Table extraction from texts is an important task for information systems, and recent approaches that prompt large language models (LLMs) with instructions have drawn great attention for their strong performance. Existing works have assumed the input texts to be table descriptions or specialized documents. However, these efforts have largely overlooked another prevalent category of texts, commonly found in news reports and social media: naturally occurring texts. Extracting tabular information from such texts poses two distinct challenges. First, high variability and the absence of explicit structural cues make fixed heuristic LLM prompts limited in precisely delineating extraction boundaries. Second, manually predefined schemas cannot capture open-ended, unseen attributes in naturally occurring text. In this paper, we propose a framework, TEAR, to address these challenges. It comprises two synergistic workflows: a Table Extraction Workflow that dynamically adapts instructions to overcome the limitation of heuristic instructions, and an Attribute Recommendation Workflow that discovers new attributes from texts to complement the heuristic schema. To our knowledge, TEAR is the first framework that supports automated text-driven attribute recommendation, enabling exploratory schema design for table extraction. To evaluate TEAR, we establish the benchmark for table extraction and attribute recommendation on naturally occurring texts, including two real-world datasets, manual annotations, appropriate metrics, and baseline comparisons. Experiments show that TEAR achieves state-of-the-art performance on both tasks, and the recommended attributes effectively enhance extraction performance in exploratory scenarios.

Automatic Text Recognition (ATR) now supplies digital humanities with large volumes of unstructured, heterogeneous, and often noisy text in ancient languages. Downstream semantic analysestext reuse identification, alignment, and semantic search-rely on sentence embeddings, yet existing methods transfer poorly to ancient languages: generic multilingual encoders underperform, specialized language models yield anisotropic representation spaces, and labeled similarity data is unavailable. We study two fully unsupervised strategies - TSDAE and contrastive sentence embedding (CSE) - that adapt a specialized token-level language model into a corpus-specific sentence encoder using only raw sentences. On the philologically central case of biblical reuse in patristic literature (2,935 expert-verified parallels in Latin and Ancient Greek, from Augustine, Jerome, and Athanasius), we decompose reuse identification into two separately evaluated tasks-binary detection and correspondence retrieval-and benchmark the adapted encoders against multilingual, specialized, distilled, and supervised fine-tuned baselines, as well as on artificially noised data simulating HTR artifacts and scribal abbreviations. The adapted encoders outperform all baselines on both tasks, with complementary profiles: TSDAE leads detection given a large in-domain corpus, while CSE leads retrieval, reaches its optimum with as few as 4-8k raw in-domain sentences-a few tens of seconds of training on a laptop GPU-and transfers across works and authors, including to noisy post-ATR text when retrained directly on it. UMAP atlases relate the geometric effect of each strategy to the measured gains, and the full pipeline-segmentation, fine-tuning, cross-corpus semantic search-is made available to non-specialists through the online tool Paraphrasis.

Large-scale document processing requires contextually aware table extraction (TE) that is both accurate and efficient. Yet current approaches require billions of parameters, hundreds of autoregressive steps, or costly API inference. Motivated by this, we introduce the Page-Object Table Transformer (POTATR), a lightweight 29M parameter image-to-graph model that extends the Table Transformer (TATR) for contextualized page-level TE. POTATR outperforms all models tested on the PubTables-v2 Single Pages benchmark -- including frontier MLLMs -- achieving $\textrm{GriTS}_\textrm{Con}$ of 0.964 while running over 130$\times$ faster at roughly 300$\times$ lower cost. Further, POTATR's output is spatially grounded: every recognized element has a bounding box, enabling visual verification and geometric text assignment. As a result, POTATR performs unified page-level TE while composing with other models, enabling extension to scanned documents via external OCR and to full-document TE via techniques like cross-page merging. Code and models will be released.