ApacheCon NA 2015

Text extraction tools are essential for obtaining the textual content and metadata of computer files for use in a wide variety of applications, including search and natural language processing tools. Techniques and tools for evaluating text extraction tools are missing from academia and industry. Apache Tika™ detects file types and extracts metadata and text from many file types. Tika is a crucial component in a wide variety of tools, including Solr™, Nutch™, Alfresco, Elasticsearch and Sleuth Kit®/Autopsy®. In this talk, we will give an overview of a new initiative within Tika to create an evaluation toolkit that allows integrators to evaluate Tika and other content extraction systems on client-specific documents. This talk will end with a brief discussion of a related initiative to take this evaluation methodology public and evaluate Tika on large batches of public domain documents.

Note: This talk was co-authored with Paul M. Herceg, Lead Artificial Intelligence Engineer, The MITRE Corporation. Paul holds an M.S. in Computer Science and a B.S. in Computer Science-Mathematics, both from the State University of New York at Binghamton.