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Multigrid

Meetings, email, chat and filled-in forms

Extraction from documents with no fixed layout at all — threads, transcripts, survey text and handwriting.

Everything else people call document extraction has a document. An invoice has a total somewhere, a passport has a machine-readable zone in a fixed place, a tax form has numbered boxes that mean what the authority says they mean. You can be wrong about where a field is, but the field exists at a coordinate and you can check yourself against the form. None of that is true here. Minutes, an email export, a chat log and a free-text survey answer have no layout to learn, and the reason they are grouped together is that each one has to find its structure somewhere other than the page.

Usually it is there. Email carries a real parent-child graph in its headers, so thread order is a lookup rather than a guess. Minutes are an edited document with numbered items and a convention about which verbs record a decision. A chat export has an opaque speaker id and a timestamp encoding you can read from the vendor’s own format notes. Survey text has nothing at all, which is why the codebook you write becomes the structure and the deliverable both. These pages are about finding that hidden structure and then about the specific ways each one lies to you.

Extracting Action Items and Owners From Meeting Minutes

A schema and a worked run for pulling owner, task and due date out of minutes that already exist, including the duplicate-action and carry-forward traps.

10 min read

Extracting Attendee Lists From Meeting Minutes

Why present, in attendance and apologies are three different states, and what collapsing them into one list of names destroys.

9 min read

Extracting Decisions Made From a Set of Meeting Minutes

The wording cues that separate a recorded decision from a discussion point that sounds like one, and why the verb is more reliable than the model's judgement.

9 min read

Extracting Sender, Recipients and Thread Structure From an Email Export

Reconstructing a real reply tree from RFC 5322 References and In-Reply-To headers, and separating quoted history from new text.

11 min read

Extracting Action Items From an Email Thread

Pulling an owner-task-deadline record out of thread bodies, and what to do with the commitment whose owner is genuinely not determinable.

10 min read

Extracting Attachments Metadata From an Email Export

Reading filename, size and type out of MIME parts, telling a real attachment from an inline signature logo, and catching the attachment a message references but does not contain.

10 min read

Extracting Speaker Turns From a Chat Transcript

How support-widget, SMS and messaging-app exports each encode who is speaking, and a normalisation schema that survives all three.

10 min read

Extracting Timestamps From a Chat Transcript With Inconsistent Formats

A transcript mixing '2m ago' with 'Yesterday 3:14 PM' and full ISO stamps, and a method that resolves all three to one zone-aware instant without inventing any.

10 min read

Extracting Structured Fields From a Support Ticket Body

A schema for product, version, severity, steps to reproduce and expected-versus-actual, built so the fields a ticket does not contain stay empty.

11 min read

Extracting Order Numbers Referenced Inside a Support Ticket

Candidate generation for the several shapes a customer pastes an order number in, then resolution against your own order table rather than by pattern alone.

9 min read

Extracting Coded Answers From Open-Ended Survey Responses

Building a fixed codebook, applying it to free-text answers, and measuring agreement per code — including why a rare code always looks terrible.

12 min read

Extracting Numeric Ratings Embedded in Free-Text Survey Comments

Reading a stated rating out of a comment, keeping it in its own column, and why the scale answer must never be overwritten by it.

9 min read

Extracting Checked and Unchecked Boxes From a Scanned Form

Why proving a box is empty takes two detections rather than one, and a threshold policy for pencil marks, crosses, folds and bleed-through.

11 min read

Designing a Schema for a Form With Optional and Repeating Checkbox Groups

Modelling check-all-that-apply as a set and pick-one as an enum, with the empty-versus-absent distinction and a representation for states the form forbids.

10 min read

Extracting Text From Handwritten Meeting Notes

The conventions meeting notes carry that general handwriting does not — margin owners, arrows, ditto marks and a personal abbreviation set — and why the transcription must stay verbatim.

10 min read

Extracting Structured Fields From a Handwritten Order Form

Quantity and product code on a handwritten order, where a product code has a check digit to catch a misread and a quantity has nothing at all.

10 min read

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