Message extraction from printed documents-a complete solution

The task to be solved within our core research was the design and development of a document analysis toolbox covering typical document analysis tasks such as document understanding, information extraction and text recognition. In order to prove the feasibility of our concepts, we have developed the prototypical analysis system OfficeMAID (Office Mail Analysis, Interpretation and Delivery). The system analyses documents, as used in the daily work of a purchasing department, by a priori knowledge about workflows and document features. In this way, the system provides goal-directed information extraction, shallow understanding and process identification for given documents (paper, fax, e-mail)