Using Lift to Turn Research PDFs into Structured JSON with Controlled, Schema-Guided Field-Level Evaluation

This tutorial demonstrates how to use Lift, a tool for extracting structured data from research PDFs, by converting document content into JSON format following a predefined schema. The process involves setting up a GPU environment with appropriate memory optimization techniques, such as 4-bit quantization to allow large models to run on constrained hardware like 16 GB GPUs. The tutorial uses synthetic multi-page research reports with intentionally challenging elements like ambiguous metrics and missing information to test whether the model can accurately extract titles, authors, datasets, metrics, and other relevant fields from document layouts. This approach enables realistic evaluation of the extraction system's ability to follow schema-guided extraction rules rather than relying on simple text matching.