NSW govt records overseer looks to machine learning

State Archives and Records NSW will pilot machine learning technology to determine whether it can be used to automate some records classification and disposal activities. The records management authority said in a blog post that it plans to run pilots "to assess the technology's capabilities in sentencing unstructured data". Sentencing is a process used to identify and classify documents, usually for the purpose of determining which ones can be safely disposed of. The authority said it would be "seeking partnerships for an agency pilot and will also run an internal pilot using in-house data". The internal pilot will use machine learning "to apply GA28 to a corpus of digital records which have already been sentenced manually" - presumably to determine how accurate the algorithm is compared to a traditional methods.