Machine Learning is the Wrong Way to Extract Data From Most Documents

Documents have spent decades stubbornly guarding their contents against software. In the late 1960s, the first OCR (optical character recognition) techniques turned scanned documents into raw text. By indexing and searching the text from these digitized documents, software sped up formerly laborious legal discovery and research projects. Today, Google, Microsoft, and Amazon provide high-quality OCR as part of their cloud services offerings. But documents remain underused in software toolchains, and valuable data languish in trillions of PDFs.