Document Question Answering (QA)¶

Sometimes, instead of searching for specific text patterns, you just want to ask the document a question directly. natural-pdf includes an extractive Question Answering feature.

"Extractive" means it finds the literal answer text within the document, rather than generating a new answer or summarizing.

Let's ask our 01-practice.pdf a few questions.

In [1]:

#%pip install "natural-pdf[ai]"  # DocumentQA relies on torch + transformers

#%pip install "natural-pdf[ai]" # DocumentQA relies on torch + transformers

In [2]:

from natural_pdf import PDF

# Load the PDF and get the page
pdf = PDF("https://github.com/jsoma/natural-pdf/raw/refs/heads/main/pdfs/01-practice.pdf")
page = pdf.pages[0]

# Ask about the date
question_1 = "What is the inspection date?"
answer_1 = page.ask(question_1)

# The result dictionary always contains:
#   question    - original question
#   answer      – extracted span (string, may be empty)
#   confidence  – model score 0–1
#   start / end – indices into page.words
#   found       – False if confidence < min_confidence
answer_1

from natural_pdf import PDF # Load the PDF and get the page pdf = PDF("https://github.com/jsoma/natural-pdf/raw/refs/heads/main/pdfs/01-practice.pdf") page = pdf.pages[0] # Ask about the date question_1 = "What is the inspection date?" answer_1 = page.ask(question_1) # The result dictionary always contains: # question - original question # answer – extracted span (string, may be empty) # confidence – model score 0–1 # start / end – indices into page.words # found – False if confidence < min_confidence answer_1

Device set to use mps

Out[2]:

{'question': 'What is the inspection date?',
 'answer': 'February 3, 1905',
 'confidence': 0.9979940056800842,
 'start': 6,
 'end': 6,
 'found': True,
 'page_num': 0,
 'source_elements': <ElementCollection[TextElement](count=1)>}

In [3]:

page.ask("What company was inspected?")

page.ask("What company was inspected?")

Out[3]:

{'question': 'What company was inspected?',
 'answer': 'Jungle Health and Safety Inspection Service',
 'confidence': 0.9988948106765747,
 'start': 0,
 'end': 0,
 'found': True,
 'page_num': 0,
 'source_elements': <ElementCollection[TextElement](count=1)>}

In [4]:

page.ask( "What is statute 5.8.3 about?")

page.ask( "What is statute 5.8.3 about?")

Out[4]:

{'question': 'What is statute 5.8.3 about?',
 'answer': 'Inadequate Protective Equipment.',
 'confidence': 0.9997999668121338,
 'start': 26,
 'end': 26,
 'found': True,
 'page_num': 0,
 'source_elements': <ElementCollection[TextElement](count=1)>}

The results include the extracted answer, a confidence score (useful for filtering uncertain answers), the page_num, and the source_elements.

Visualising Where the Answer Came From¶

You can manually access results sources through answer['source_elements'] but it's much more fun to just use .show().

In [5]:

answer = page.ask("What is the inspection ID?")
answer.show()

answer = page.ask("What is the inspection ID?") answer.show()

Out[5]:

Asking an entire PDF¶

You don't need to select a single page to use .ask! It also works for entire PDFs, regions, anything.

In [6]:

pdf.ask("What company was inspected?")

pdf.ask("What company was inspected?")

Out[6]:

{'answer': 'Jungle Health and Safety Inspection Service',
 'confidence': 0.9988948106765747,
 'found': True,
 'page_num': 1,
 'source_elements': [],
 'start': 0,
 'end': 0}

Notice that it collects the page number for later investigation.

Collecting Results into a DataFrame¶

If you're asking multiple questions, it's often useful to collect the results into a pandas DataFrame. page.ask supports passing a list of questions directly. This is far faster than looping because the underlying model is invoked only once.

In [7]:

from natural_pdf import PDF
import pandas as pd

pdf = PDF("https://github.com/jsoma/natural-pdf/raw/refs/heads/main/pdfs/01-practice.pdf")
page = pdf.pages[0]

questions = [
    "What is the inspection date?",
    "What company was inspected?",
    "What is statute 5.8.3 about?",
    "How many violations were there in total?"
]

answers = page.ask(questions, min_confidence=0.2)

df = pd.json_normalize(answers)
df

from natural_pdf import PDF import pandas as pd pdf = PDF("https://github.com/jsoma/natural-pdf/raw/refs/heads/main/pdfs/01-practice.pdf") page = pdf.pages[0] questions = [ "What is the inspection date?", "What company was inspected?", "What is statute 5.8.3 about?", "How many violations were there in total?" ] answers = page.ask(questions, min_confidence=0.2) df = pd.json_normalize(answers) df

Out[7]:

	question	answer	confidence	start	end	found	page_num	source_elements
0	What is the inspection date?	February 3, 1905	0.997994	6	6	True	0	[<TextElement text='February 3...' font='Helve...
1	What company was inspected?	Jungle Health and Safety Inspection Service	0.998895	0	0	True	0	[<TextElement text='Jungle Hea...' font='Helve...
2	What is statute 5.8.3 about?	Inadequate Protective Equipment.	0.999800	26	26	True	0	[<TextElement text='Inadequate...' font='Helve...
3	How many violations were there in total?	4.12.7	0.662560	22	22	True	0	[<TextElement text='4.12.7' font='Helvetica' s...

pd.json_normalize flattens the list of answer dictionaries straight into a DataFrame, making it easy to inspect the questions, their extracted answers, and associated confidence scores.

TODO¶

• Demonstrate passing model="impira/layoutlm-document-qa" to switch models.

QA Model and Limitations¶

• The QA system relies on underlying transformer models. Performance and confidence scores vary.
• It works best for questions where the answer is explicitly stated. It cannot synthesize information or perform calculations (e.g., counting items might fail or return text containing a number rather than the count itself).
• You can potentially specify different QA models via the model= argument in page.ask() if others are configured.