DEV Community

Discussion on: Have you done anything interesting with AI/ML?

Collapse
 
matthewbdaly profile image
Matthew Daly

A few years back I wrote a letter classifier in PHP.

Before becoming a developer I worked for an insurer and they would scan any incoming correspondence and have staff classifying it, eg was it a complaint, request for information, request for surrender of their policy etc. I was interested in seeing how practical it would be to automate that. My solution involved taking a PDF file, converting it to a PNG, running it through Tesseract OCR to extract the text, and checking the text using ML to determine the intent.

My solution actually seemed to work reasonably well with my own mocked up examples, but if I was actually doing it for real there would be an extensive corpus of existing documents it could be trained on. Based on this I think it likely my old job won't be around by the end of the decade.