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Every document that reaches us is read by a language model rather than by a person, whichever way it arrived. Some judgements a workflow makes are put to a model too, such as whether two written addresses name the same place or whether a document is the kind that was asked for. Models are not exact. What that can produce:
  • Nothing usable. The document could not be read, and the step fails with a clear reason. A blurred photograph, a cropped page, a document that is not the kind the step asked for. This one announces itself, and a better copy settles it.
  • A value that is plausible and wrong. A digit swapped in a number, a name taken off the line below the one that matters, a year read from the wrong row. Nothing about the value says it was misread, which makes this the case worth designing around.
  • The wrong one of several. Where a document names more than one party, account or date, the model picks, and it can pick the wrong one.
  • A judgement that goes the wrong way, where a step asks a model to decide rather than to read.
  • Readings that are not perfectly repeatable. The same document read on two separate occasions can come back slightly different, so a difference between two readings is not evidence that the document changed.

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What stands against it

Most of what a verification publishes is not the reading. Where a body issues the document, the reading is used to look the subject up, and that body’s record is what gets published: the GST registry’s registration, the income-tax registry’s word on a PAN, the bank’s word on an account. A misread identifier is one the source does not hold, so it fails rather than passing with a wrong value. Where nothing can confirm a reading, the reading is the result. Some documents have no register behind them and some judgements have no second opinion, and what those steps publish rests on the reading alone.

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What to do with that

  • Read an -unreadable failure as a document problem, not a finding about the subject. Give it a path back to a better copy rather than a rejection.
  • Route a step that passed carrying a gap, or a near-miss score, to a person. That is what those signals are for.
  • Ask us which values in your workflow rest on a reading alone, and what your workflow holds each document up against. Both are configuration, and both can be tightened.