Reading order and multi-column

[lgeo3]

Hi, thank you a lot for your publication and this github repository.
I tried to reproducce some of the paper results by first training a Bert network on DocBank dataset, but I fail to reach similar performance as the one provided in the paper. One of my hypothesis concerns the order of word in the input that I provide to BERT.

When looking at the data, it appears to me that, on some example, the order of words is not in reading order but in left-to-right order. For example if we look at file 10.tar_1701.04170.gz_TPNL_afterglow_evo_8.txt we jump from one column to the second one.

In my understanding, the reading order is really important to be able to use/finetune Bert.

Moreover in your publication it appears that you used dataset in reading order ( 'We organize the DocBank dataset using the reading order" section).

Here are my questions:

• can you confirm that the word in the .txt files are not necessarly in the reading order ?
• do you provide the dataset in the reading order ?

Thank you again, and I hope that my questions make sense.

[liminghao1630]

We provide the words in the order of the PDFPlumber.