Business documents are central to the operation of all organizations, and they come in all shapes and sizes: project reports, planning documents, technical specifications, financial statements, meeting minutes, legal agreements, contracts, resumes, purchase orders, invoices, and many more. The ability to read, understand and interpret these documents, referred to here as Document Intelligence (DI), is challenging due to not only many domains of knowledge involved, but also their complex formats and structures, internal and external cross references deployed, and even less-than-ideal quality of scans and OCR oftentimes performed on them. This workshop aims to explore and advance the current state of research and practice in answering these challenges.

In the regular course of business, companies spend a lot of effort reading and interpreting documents, a highly manual process that involves tedious tasks, such as identifying dates and names or locating the presence or absence of certain clauses in a contract. Dealing with natural language is complex and further complicated by the fact that these documents come in various formats (scanned image, digital formats) and have different degrees of internal structure (spreadsheets, invoices, text documents). We present DICR, an end-to-end, modular, and trainable system that automates the mundane aspects of document review and allows humans to perform the validation. The system is able to speed up this work while increasing quality of information extracted, consistency, throughput, and decreasing time to decision. Extracted data can be fed into other downstream applications (from dashboards to Q&A and to report generation).

This paper describes USI Answers a natural language question answering system for semi-structured industry data. The paper reports on the progress towards the goal of offering easy access to enterprise data to a large number of business users, most of whom are not familiar with the specific syntax or semantics of the underlying data sources. Additional complications come from the nature of the data, which comes both as structured and unstructured. The proposed solution allows users to express questions in natural language, makes apparent the system’s interpretation of the query, and allows easy query adjustment and reformulation. The application is in use by more than 1500 users from Siemens Energy. We evaluate our approach on a data set consisting of fleet data.

We describe a problem solver built to answer questions like those on advanced placement exams using knowledge bases authored by domain experts. The problem solver is designed to work independently of any particular knowledge base or domain. Given a question, the problem solver identifies those portions of the knowledge base that are relevant to the question. We found that simple heuristics for judging relevance significantly improved performance, with no drop in coverage.

An important problem in artificial intelligence is capturing, from natural language, formal representationsallthat can be used by a reasoner to compute an answer. Many researchers have studied this problem by developing algorithms addressing specific phenomena in natural language interpretation, but few have studied (or cataloged) the types of failures associated with this problem. Knowledgeallof these failures can help researchers by providing a roadallmap of open research problems and help practitioners by providing a checklist of issues to address in order to build systems that can achieve good performance on this problem.allIn this paper, we present a study -- conducted in the context of the Halo Project -- cataloging the types of failures that occur when capturing knowledge from naturallanguage. We identified the categories of failures by examining a corpus of questions posed byallnaive usersallto a knowledge based question answering system and empirically demonstrated the generality of ourallcategorizations. We also describe available technologies that can address some of the failures we have identified.