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Inside Innovation at Xerox: Smart Document Review Technology Puts Millions of Documents at your Fingertips

Friday 17. December 2010 - Documents can be moved across digital table top, similar to real sheets of paper on your desk

Imagine being able to find, open, sort, move and review thousands of documents at the touch of a finger. Or how about sorting through millions of documents in hours rather than weeks?

Scientists at Xerox Corporation (NYSE: XRX) have created a prototype “smart document” review system where users can gather around a large touch-sensitive table top display and sort documents merely by moving their fingers across the screen. The interface is as familiar as using your iPhone or smartphone touch screen – but more than a 150 times larger, making it easy for several people to work together.
Developed by researchers at the Xerox Research Centre Europe, the document review technology assists users to quickly group similar documents. Documents can be put side-by-side for comparison, scaled up or down, or piled in a corner of the table, just as real sheets of papers are placed on a real desk, but with all the capabilities of digital documents. And, by simply pointing to a few relevant documents, the user “teaches” the system what information is important. The system then uses this knowledge to automatically categorize and sort millions of documents in a fraction of the time it takes to do so manually.
The research technology promises to significantly improve the document review process, one of the biggest challenges for document-intensive industries such as insurance, pharmaceutical, medical, financial and legal. For example in the e-discovery process attorneys can examine a small portion of the evidence documents, indicating which ones are relevant to the case and those that are not. The smart document review system then quickly scans the entire repository, automatically retrieving all documents to be read by a professional.
“When you consider the vast number of documents involved in litigation, patent searching, government security and intelligence analyst reports, it’s easy to understand how some review efforts involve millions of documents,” said Caroline Privault, project leader at the research center. “We believe that a tool like this will have a major impact on the cost, accuracy and speed of document review.”
Xerox’s document review system builds on previous technology called CategoriX, developed by a team of researchers at Xerox Research Centre Europe. CategoriX itself is currently available as part of Xerox Litigation Services suite of offerings for advanced e-discovery in the legal industry.
CategoriX is an automated document classification tool designed by scientists in linguistics and statistics. This technology combined with the touch-table screen from PQ Labs form the basis of this smart document review prototype.
The prototype system is going through a customer pilot phase before being further developed for commercialization. Availability will be announced at a later date.