Document Structuring

FAQ

What is the difference between document structuring and OCR?

OCR (Optical Character Recognition) is a pre-processing step in document structuring, responsible for recognizing text from images or scanned documents and outputting plain text or text blocks with coordinates. Document structuring further performs semantic parsing on the OCR output, including entity extraction (e.g., person names, dates, amounts), relation classification (e.g., the relationship between 'signing party' and 'total contract price'), table reconstruction, paragraph reorganization, etc., ultimately generating structured data. OCR solves 'seeing the words', while document structuring solves 'understanding the words'.

How can non-tech industries start a document structuring project?

First, conduct a business pain point analysis to clarify the types of documents to be structured (e.g., contracts, invoices, reports) and the expected output format. Second, run a small-sample pilot, select typical documents for annotation and model training, and verify the technology's effectiveness. Meanwhile, facilitate cross-department collaboration, involve business personnel in defining annotation rules to ensure the output meets actual usage. Finally, formulate an iteration plan to continuously optimize the model based on accuracy feedback, and provide employee training to reduce transformation resistance.

What are the successful applications of document structuring in the finance industry?

Typical applications include: ① Automated document review in credit approval (automatic extraction of key fields from ID cards, bank statements, mortgage contracts, etc.); ② Financial document processing (automatic verification and data entry of checks, drafts, VAT invoices); ③ Intelligent contract review (automatic identification of risk clauses, expiration dates, payment terms, etc.); ④ Regulatory compliance report generation (extracting data from massive documents to fill reports). These applications typically achieve over 80% automatic field extraction accuracy, and close to 100% with manual review.

What preliminary data preparation is needed for document structuring?

Three types of data need to be prepared: ① Raw document samples: covering all document variations (different versions, print quality, layouts); ② Annotated data: precisely annotate key fields for each document (e.g., bounding box positions, field categories, attribute values), it is recommended to annotate at least 500 documents per type; ③ Business rule templates: define field validation logic (e.g., date format, amount range) and relationships between fields (e.g., total contract price = unit price × quantity). If historical data is insufficient, synthetic data or pre-trained models can be used for initial training.

How to ensure data security after document structuring?

The following measures are typically adopted: ① Data masking: automatically mask sensitive information (e.g., ID numbers, bank account numbers) during extraction or use pseudonymization techniques; ② Transmission encryption: use TLS/SSL encryption for document upload and structured result download; ③ Access control: set field-level view permissions based on roles (administrator, auditor, regular user); ④ Audit logs: record all data access and modification operations; ⑤ On-premises deployment: support private deployment to customer servers for high-security industries such as finance and government.