The Problem: Unstructured Data Is Everywhere
If you’ve ever tried to pull data out of a scanned document or image, like receipts, invoices, restaurant menus, or even handwritten forms, you know the pain.
OCR tools (like Tesseract or AWS Textract) are great at recognizing text, but they just output unstructured chaos. Recently, we faced this problem while extracting restaurant menu data from PDFs and photos. Each menu had a different layout, font, and price format, and what I got back from the OCR models was a wall of unstructured text: random words, misaligned prices — useless for queries, pricing analysis, or downstream systems.