DocSpiral: A Platform for Integrated Assistive Document Annotation through Human-in-the-Spiral

TL;DR

DocSpiral is an innovative human-in-the-loop platform that streamlines the annotation of image-based documents, reducing manual effort and enhancing model training for structured data extraction in specialized fields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel spiral, iterative annotation framework that integrates normalization, annotation, evaluation, and API tools into a unified workflow for document processing.

Findings

Reduces annotation time by at least 41%

Achieves consistent performance improvements across iterations

Facilitates AI/ML development in domain-specific document fields

Abstract

Acquiring structured data from domain-specific, image-based documents such as scanned reports is crucial for many downstream tasks but remains challenging due to document variability. Many of these documents exist as images rather than as machine-readable text, which requires human annotation to train automated extraction systems. We present DocSpiral, the first Human-in-the-Spiral assistive document annotation platform, designed to address the challenge of extracting structured information from domain-specific, image-based document collections. Our spiral design establishes an iterative cycle in which human annotations train models that progressively require less manual intervention. DocSpiral integrates document format normalization, comprehensive annotation interfaces, evaluation metrics dashboard, and API endpoints for the development of AI / ML models into a unified workflow. Experiments demonstrate that our framework reduces annotation time by at least 41\% while showing consistent performance gains across three iterations during model training. By making this annotation platform freely accessible, we aim to lower barriers to AI/ML models development in document processing, facilitating the adoption of large language models in image-based, document-intensive fields such as geoscience and healthcare. The system is freely available at: https://app.ai4wa.com. The demonstration video is available: https://app.ai4wa.com/docs/docspiral/demo.