Automatic Fax Routing

We present a system for automatic FAX routing which processes incoming FAX images and forwards them to the correct email alias. The system first performs optical character recognition to find words and in some cases parts of words (we have observed error rates as high as 10 to 20 percent). For all these “noisy” words, a set of features is computed which include internal text features, location features, and relationship features. These features are combined to estimate the relevance of the word in the context of the page and the recipient database. The parameters of the word relevance function are learned from training data using the AdaBoost learning algorithm. Words are then compared to the database of recipients to find likely matches. The recipients are finally ranked by combining the quality of the matches and the relevance of the words. Experiments are presented which demonstrate the effectiveness of this system on a large set of real data.