Pre-processing involves the automated cleaning, organizing, and structuring of uploaded files to prepare the documents for data extraction.

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Importance of Pre-Processing

By ensuring documents are well-prepared before extraction, pre-processing
  • Reduces the likelihood of errors in later stages
  • Improves the speed and accuracy of data extraction
  • Enables the seamless handling of various document types and formats

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Key Pre-processing Actions:

  • Invalid File Handling: Identify issues that mean a document cannot be processed, such as insufficient text in the document, unsupported file types, corrupted files, or password-protected documents.
  • File Format Conversion: This involves converting file formats (e.g., images, PDFs with embedded data) into a PDF format suitable for processing.
  • Remove Duplicates: Workspaces can be configured to identify and reject documents that have already been processed. This can be configured by the user in Workflow Settings; see Remove Duplicates for more information.
  • OCR (Optical Character Recognition): Extracting text from scanned or image-based documents using advanced OCR technology, ensuring high accuracy for all document types and formats. See OCR and Text Extraction for more information.
  • Language Detection: Automatically identifies the language of the document to ensure high-accuracy extraction.
Pre-processing settings can be found in your Workspace Workflow Settings. Pre-processing Settings

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Advanced Pre-processing Settings:

Reading Order Model: The Affinda Platform uses our proprietary reading order algorithms by default to capture word sequences in visually rich documents in a way that aligns with human comprehension. This ensures that text is processed in the same order a human would read it, leading to more accurate extractions. Split Words: Ensures words that are incorrectly combined are separated for extraction. Default is on.