DocPolarBERT: A Pre-trained Model for Document Understanding with Relative Polar Coordinate Encoding of Layout Structures (2026.eacl-long)
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| Challenge: | Existing models that take text block positions into account are not efficient for document understanding. |
| Approach: | They propose a layout-aware BERT model that takes into account text block positions in relative polar coordinate system rather than the Cartesian one. |
| Outcome: | The proposed model eliminates the need for absolute positional embeddings on a dataset more than six times smaller than the widely used IIT-CDIP corpus. |
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