Extracting Text From Documents

Goals

The goal of the first part of the project was to use Army documents to create a dataset of officer assignments that could assist the Social and Decision Analytics Division (SDAD) and other Army analysts in modeling soldier career progression.

• Assignments are jobs, or positions, a soldier can hold in their branch of the Army.
• Assignments occur with a Rank, such as “Captain” or “Colonel.”
• Assignments are also categorized as either Key Developmental or Developmental/Broadening
  • “Key Developmental” assignments are the most important assignments for an officer to complete in order to advance in rank.

A sample instance of the desired output from this portion of the project might look something like this:

Desired Output Format of Data From Army Documents

The task of extracting a simple dataset from complex source material prompted us to explore a variety of methods for extracting data from a corpus of documents with inconsistent information presentation and formatting. Learn more about the documents and their challenges by viewing our data source page.

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Program Contacts: Joel Thurston and Cesar Montalvo