One of the best things about the amazon cloud is that amazon is continually introducing new services and features. One of the more interesting services that amazon previewed in late november 2019 is textract.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia at its simplest, textract could be thought of as optical character recognition (OCR) software. However, textract goes far beyond the capabilities that are usually associated with OCR.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia

Back in the 1990s, I briefly operated an online store. Rather than manually transcribing my price list into the web application's database, I thought that I could save myself a lot of time by scanning the price list and using OCR on the resulting file.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia although the OCR software did a surprisingly good job, the resulting text was not in a usable format. I had to spend quite a few hours coding an application that would transform my scanned text into a format that my web application could use.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia I spent so much time scanning the text, performing OCR, and then transforming the resulting text that I probably could have just transcribed the price list instead.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia

At the time, I was willing to overlook these difficulties, because OCR technology was still brand new. My problem with OCR, however, is that the software hasn't really evolved very much in the last 20 years.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia A couple of weeks ago, for example, I was working with a tool that uses OCR to extract text from fax messages. Although this seems like a really straightforward task, the process suffered from misrecognized characters and incorrect formatting.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia more specifically, some of the paragraph breaks were completely removed, while stray whitespace was inserted into a couple of seemingly random places.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia

Imagine for a moment that an insurance company is trying to use OCR as a tool for processing thousands of paper enrollment forms. In the past, there would likely have been a back-end application that tells the OCR engine how to read the form.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia the application might, for example, define the boundaries of the various fields on the page, and also define the data that's expected to exist in each of those fields.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia

Although this approach works, there are two big problems with handling OCR in this way. First, there's a considerable amount of effort involved in writing code that helps an OCR engine to know what types of data to expect at various locations on a page.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia from a business prospective, there's a cost associated with the development of such code, and the scanning process cannot commence until the code is complete and has been thoroughly tested.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia

Amazon's approach is to use machine learning to identify data types on a page. In america, for example, a number in the format of xxx-xx-xxxx is typically going to be a social security number.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia as such, textract can look for this type of numerical pattern and identify any matches as a social security number. Similarly, phone numbers generally adhere to a known format, (xxx) xxx-xxxx, as do addresses, xxx name of street, city, state, ZIP code.Cognitive learning theory wikipedia names are a bit trickier, but some names are very common and the detection of such names might help textract to identify a name field.