In recent years, there has been a growing need for intelligent document processing, especially in industries such as finance, healthcare, and legal. Intelligent document processing involves extracting information from documents such as invoices, contracts, and medical records, and making sense of that information in a structured and actionable format.

One technology that has gained popularity in this space is Nashorn, a JavaScript engine that is built into Java. Nashorn allows developers to write and execute JavaScript code within a Java application, making it a powerful tool for intelligent document processing tasks.

What is Nashorn?

Nashorn is a high-performance JavaScript engine that is included in Java 8 and later versions. It provides a JavaScript runtime environment that can be seamlessly integrated with Java code, allowing developers to leverage the power of both languages in a single application. Nashorn is based on the ECMAScript 5.1 standard and provides features such as dynamic typing, runtime eval, and built-in JSON support.

Why use Nashorn for intelligent document processing?

1. Powerful text processing capabilities: Nashorn provides a rich set of string manipulation functions that make it easy to extract and manipulate text from documents. With regular expressions, string splitting, and substring functions, developers can effectively parse and clean up raw document data.

2. Flexibility and extensibility: Nashorn allows developers to easily extend its capabilities with Java libraries and third-party modules. This means that developers can leverage existing Java libraries for document processing tasks, such as Apache PDFBox for PDF manipulation or Apache Tika for content extraction.

3. Integration with machine learning libraries: Nashorn can be used to bridge the gap between Java and JavaScript-based machine learning libraries. This enables developers to use popular machine learning frameworks such as TensorFlow.js or Brain.js to perform natural language processing or entity extraction tasks on document data.

Example: Extracting invoice data using Nashorn

To demonstrate the power of Nashorn for intelligent document processing, let’s consider an example of extracting invoice data from a PDF document. We will use Apache PDFBox to read the PDF and Nashorn to process the extracted text.

import org.apache.pdfbox.pdmodel.PDDocument;
import org.apache.pdfbox.text.PDFTextStripper;
import jdk.nashorn.api.scripting.*;

public class InvoiceProcessor {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        PDDocument document = PDDocument.load(new File("invoice.pdf"));
        PDFTextStripper stripper = new PDFTextStripper();
        String pdfText = stripper.getText(document);
        
        ScriptEngineManager manager = new ScriptEngineManager();
        ScriptEngine engine = manager.getEngineByName("nashorn");
        
        // JavaScript code for processing invoice data
        String script = "var invoiceData = {\"total\": 0, \"items\": []};\n" +
                        "// Extract relevant data from pdfText and update invoiceData\n" +
                        "...\n" +
                        "\n" +
                        "JSON.stringify(invoiceData);";
        
        String invoiceJson = (String) engine.eval(script);
        
        System.out.println("Extracted invoice data:");
        System.out.println(invoiceJson);
        
        document.close();
    }
}

In this example, we load a PDF document using Apache PDFBox and extract the text using the PDFTextStripper class. We then pass this text to Nashorn, where we execute JavaScript code to process the invoice data. The resulting invoice data is converted to JSON format using the JSON.stringify function and printed to the console.

Conclusion

Nashorn is a powerful tool for intelligent document processing in Java applications. It combines the flexibility and ease of use of JavaScript with the robustness and extensibility of Java, making it an ideal choice for tasks such as extracting information from invoices, contracts, and other documents. By leveraging Nashorn, developers can build efficient and intelligent document processing solutions that help streamline business operations.

#Tech #DocumentProcessing