While the prototypical document of the present may be printed, the document is a technology with millennia of technological change behind it. Of equal importance is the array of new technologies for processing, analyzing and interpreting the content, in particular the natural language content, of the document. Files are the faint reflections in the domain of the computer of documents in the domain of everyday life. The life cycle of a document. Acquisition of documents in print form for the purpose of integration into the electronic domain takes place through the use of scanners, image processing software, optical character recognition OCR and document recognition or reconstruction.
Access is accomplished through document databases.
Natural language technologies can yield further improvements in these processes when combined with the fundamental technologies in each phase to facilitate the work that is to be done. Authoring aids put computing to the task of assisting in the preparation of the content and linguistic expression in a document in the same way that word processors assist in giving the document form. This area holds tremendous potential. Grammar and style checking , while unproven with respect to their productivity enhancement, carry significant attraction as an obvious extension to spelling checking. The dependence on challenging linguistic descriptive work is even more compelling for this capability than for the spelling checking task.