EVICALC
Shared-task system paper at DocInsights 2026, co-located with EMNLP 2026, on reading a figure out of a PDF before computing with it.
Accepted as a shared-task system paper at DocInsights 2026, co-located with EMNLP 2026. Written with Divya Godara as first author.
EVICALC answers questions over PDFs in the order the title suggests: find the passage first, then compute. The model is asked to write an arithmetic expression rather than to do the arithmetic, and that expression is evaluated in local code, so every step is inspectable afterwards. The more useful half of the paper is the failure analysis, including an inspected case where the layout step merged the passage that mattered into a neighbouring block, so the system answered from unrelated text.
The preprint is on arXiv.
