smartFIX: An adaptive system for document analysis and understanding

Abstract

The internet is certainly a wide-spread platform for information interchange today and the semantic web actually seems to become more and more real. However, day-to-day work in companies still necessitates the laborious, manual processing of huge amounts of printed documents. This article presents the system smartFIX, a document analysis and understanding system developed by the DFKI spin-off insiders. During the research project "adaptive Read", funded by the German ministry for research, BMBF, smartFIX was fundamentally developed to a higher maturity level, with a focus on adaptivity. The system is able to extract information from documents - documents ranging from fixed format forms to unstructured letters of many formats. Apart from the architecture, the main components and the system characteristics, we also show some results from the application of smartFIX to representative samples of medical bills and prescriptions. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2004.