Extraction Templates vs. Prompt Templates

Why not just prompt templates?

While prompt templates (such as „Classify the following text into the following categories…“) can get the work done for simple extraction tasks, they are lacking in a few crucial areas:

Limited to LLMs

The idea of Parsee’s extraction templates is to define a format that is not just limited to the use with LLMs, but can be used also to train other model types and run predictions with these

Messy for More Complex Extraction/Structuring Task

While prompt templates can work well for simple tasks such as „What is the invoice total?“ it gets very quickly very messy when also wanting to extract currencies, units, time periods etc. along with some „main“ piece of information.

Type Safety

While you can tell an LLM to return data in a specific format, there is no „guarantee“ it will do that. We try to parse the data according to the defined data type and if the parsing is not successful, we return a „null“ value, to ensure that the output data is really exactly in the right format