Classifying documents by type

Sensible supports two levels of document classification:

Classify a document by its similarity to each document type you define in your Sensible account.
Classify a document by its subtype during the extraction workflow. By default, Sensible performs this step automatically. For more information, see Devops platform.

This topic covers classifying a document by its type.

For example, if you define a bank statements type and a tax_forms type in your account, you can classify 1040 forms, 1099 forms, Bank of America statements, Chase statements, and other documents, into those two types. In this scenario, for a 2023-1-1_bankofamerica_statement_jon_doe.pdf document, Sensible:

Classifies this document into the bank_statements document type.
Classifies the statement doc by its similarity to reference documents in the bank_statements document type. The highest score is for a Bank of America sample statement.
Provides metadata for the classification, including similarity scores for this document compared to each document type in your Sensible account and to each reference document in the bank_statements type.

Use document type classification:

Prior to an extraction workflow. For example, determine which documents to extract prior to calling a Sensible extraction endpoint.
Independent from an extraction workflow. For example, determine where to route each document or to label each document in a system of record.

To improve classification results, Sensible recommends that a document type includes a sample set of reference documents that represent the diversity you expect to see in the document type. To use a document type for classification, Sensible requires that the type contains at least one reference document.

To classify documents, use the Sensible API or SDKs.