Attentive Tasks: Process-Driven Document Analysis for Multichannel Documents

The increasing amount of email data has led many companies to new challenges with their employees now having to deal with information overload while managing multiple communication channels at the same time, e.g., email, mail, and phone. Moreover, emails can contain attachments, i.e., files with additional information. Most existing approaches for reducing email processing time require significant domain specific customization efforts to achieve good performance and lack attachment handling. We aim at providing a more domain independent approach by integrating the process context and using the information expectations of a process to guide the document analysis (DA) schedule for emails and their attachments. We rely on the concepts of Attentive Tasks (ATs) and Specialist Board (SB). ATs are templates that describe all relevant and expected information about a process currently waiting for input. The SB provides a machine readable description of DA methods, so-called specialists, that extract all relevant information for further processes. We present our approach and demonstrate the benefits for a domain specific application, i.e., a financial institution.