Document Understanding – Document Types

What is document understanding? 

Word itself defines the meaning as understanding document there are two words document and understanding.

So, first let us understand what document is. Document is any kind of data stored in the format of files like any content we are storing in files, it can be an image, or it can be a PDF, or it can be a word, or it can be text file.

If we are storing some data inside of these files that we call it as a document, it can be a physical document or it can be a document inside computer. Here, understanding of these documents based on the data what we have on these files, we call it as a document understanding.

Understanding of Documents by Human vs Robot

Now, let us understand how the document can be understandable in terms of human and in terms of a programming language, Programming language in the sense here we can say, robot

As we are humans, and we have a brain and we have eyes to see and identify the documents or understand the documents, what is there in the document and what type of document it is. It is so easy right?

When it comes to the robot doesn’t have any brain or doesn’t have any eyes to see the document. So, how the robot will understand is based on the structure of the document, and the text, whatever there in the document.

Any document like it can be an image, or it can be a PDF file, or it can be a text file, or it can be a Word file. For better understanding let us focus on the PDF files.

Document Categorization

There are two categorizations for PDF documents category by nature of document and structure of document

Nature of PDF Documents

PDFs can be of two types of documents here one is the digital PDF and the other is the scanned PDF.

Digital documents

Digital PDF is machine readable pdf file. In other words, computer generated PDF.

Scanned documents

Scanned PDF is nothing but there is something else we have a physical document, which is scanned through a scanner, and it was converted to the PDF.

Structure of Documents

Documents can be categorized in to three types based on structure of documents:

1. Structured documents
2. Semi – structured documents
3. Unstructured documents

structured documents

Documents are of fixed formats through out the volume (e.g. Passport is unique for all citizens in a country)

semi – structured documents

Documents of fixed format with some variance in the volume (e.g. Invoices are of fixed format and format change from vendor to vendor)

unstructured documents

Documents are not having any fixed format as it’s a text document doesn’t have any format (e.g. Legal documents, Rental agreements)

Advantage of UiPath Document Understanding

It’s easy to extract the information from fixed documents as we can achieve with the help of simple string manipulations and regular expressions

For semi structured documents we can extract with the help of string manipulations and regular expressions but it will take lot of development as we need to create different workflow for each format. UiPath Document Understanding will help to create single workflow for all format of documents which avoids development time and low code.

Adding Artificial intelligence flavor to UiPath along with document understanding will help to automate unstructured documents as it’s not possible to automate unstructured data with help of RPA alone.