Automated understanding and decomposition of table-structured electronic documents

摘要

Systems and methods for automatically understanding and decomposing unstructured tabular information are described. No constraints are placed on the origin or format of these documents when originally submitted; the documents may be in an unstructured and/or nonstandard format, and they may be electronic or flat files. The systems and methods of this invention generally comprise obtaining an electronic ASCII-formatted document, analyzing and understanding the contents of the document, and decomposing the information contained in the document, utilizing a variety of algorithms and heuristics to do this. Embodiments of this invention automatically process a multitude of financial documents, thereby eliminating the need for human interaction with such documents in many cases and lowering the costs associated with processing such documents.