A Reliability Evaluation of Hybrid Deterministic-LLM Based Approaches for Academic Course Registration PDF Information Extraction

arXiv cs.AI / 4/2/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper evaluates reliability of extracting academic course registration (KRS) PDF information using three approaches: LLM-only, hybrid regex+LLM, and a Camelot table-parsing pipeline with LLM fallback.
  • Experiments cover 140 LLM-only test documents and 860 documents for the Camelot pipeline across four study programs with varied table and metadata layouts.
  • Three 12–14B open models (Gemma 3, Phi 4, Qwen 2.5) were run locally with Ollama on a consumer CPU (no GPU), making the study relevant for computationally constrained environments.
  • Using exact match and Levenshtein similarity (threshold 0.7), the Camelot+LLM-fallback pipeline achieved the best accuracy (EM/LS up to ~0.99–1.00) while typically processing PDFs in under 1 second.
  • The results indicate that hybrid deterministic + LLM strategies improve efficiency over LLM-only, particularly for deterministic metadata, with Qwen 2.5:14b showing the most consistent performance.

Abstract

This study evaluates the reliability of information extraction approaches from KRS documents using three strategies: LLM only, Hybrid Deterministic - LLM (regex + LLM), and a Camelot based pipeline with LLM fallback. Experiments were conducted on 140 documents for the LLM based test and 860 documents for the Camelot based pipeline evaluation, covering four study programs with varying data in tables and metadata. Three 12 - 14B LLM models (Gemma 3, Phi 4, and Qwen 2.5) were run locally using Ollama and a consumer grade CPU without a GPU. Evaluations used exact match (EM) and Levenshtein similarity (LS) metrics with a threshold of 0.7. Although not applicable to all models, the results show that the hybrid approach can improve efficiency compared to LLM only, especially for deterministic metadata. The Camelot based pipeline with LLM fallback produced the best combination of accuracy (EM and LS up to 0.99 - 1.00) and computational efficiency (less than 1 second per PDF in most cases). The Qwen 2.5:14b model demonstrated the most consistent performance across all scenarios. These findings confirm that integrating deterministic and LLM methods is increasingly reliable and efficient for information extraction from text based academic documents in computationally constrained environments.