GAIDA: Generative AI for Human-in-the-Loop Document Annotation

Islam Mesabah, Ali Elhosary, Priyabanta Sandulu, Darko Obradovic, Sebastian J. Vollmer

Document annotation is a fundamental yet labor-intensive step in building document information extraction systems. While Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Large Language Models (LLMs) can automate parts of this process, we argue that annotation systems should be judged not by how completely they remove human effort, but by how effectively they redirect it toward review and correction. We propose a modular human-in-the-loop architecture that integrates OCR-based extraction, LLM-based semantic pre-annotation, and human validation in a single editable workflow, and present \textbf{GAIDA}, a research prototype serving as its reference implementation. GAIDA supports interchangeable OCR engines, LLM backends, and prompt configurations, and enables stage-specific measurement of annotation effort. In an initial single-annotator, stage-specific study on the FUNSD scanned-form and WildReceipt retail-receipt benchmarks, OCR assistance reduced region-creation and transcription time by up to \textbf{80.9\%}, and reviewing LLM pre-annotations reduced semantic-labeling time by up to \textbf{73.7\%}, despite imperfect pre-annotations of 78.86\% and 86.98\% Micro F1 on FUNSD and…