Mastering Textract and Comprehend: Document Intelligence with AWS

Abstract

This practical guide explores the powerful combination of Amazon Textract and Amazon Comprehend for extracting, analyzing, and deriving insights from documents and text. Readers will learn how to build production-ready document intelligence systems in the AWS ecosystem, from basic extraction to advanced analysis. With a focus on healthcare and medical applications alongside core business use cases, this book provides the essential knowledge to transform unstructured documents into structured, actionable data using AWS's AI services.

Target Audience

• AWS solution architects and developers building document processing systems
• Data engineers designing extraction and analysis pipelines
• Healthcare IT professionals working with medical documents
• Business analysts and data scientists handling document-centric workflows
• Software developers integrating document processing into applications

Hook

Unlock the power of your organization's documents with AWS Textract and Comprehend.

From extracting complex tables to identifying medical entities in clinical notes, this guide provides a practical framework for turning unstructured documents into structured, actionable intelligence. Learn how to build real-world document processing systems that solve business problems while maintaining security, compliance, and scalability.

Topics Covered

Part 1: Foundations [BEGINNER LEVEL]

1. Introduction to Document Intelligence on AWS
   • The business case for automated document processing
   • Common document intelligence use cases
   • AWS AI services overview and where Textract and Comprehend fit
   • Learning Goals: Understand the document AI landscape in AWS and identify appropriate services
2. Quick Start: Building Your First Document Processor
   • Setting up your AWS environment
   • "Hello World" with Textract and Comprehend
   • End-to-end project: PDF to structured JSON
   • Learning Goals: Get immediate value from Textract and Comprehend with minimal setup
3. Understanding Amazon Textract
   • Textract capabilities and limitations
   • Core API operations
   • Document types and support
   • Synchronous vs. asynchronous processing
   • Learning Goals: Develop foundational knowledge of Textract's capabilities
4. Understanding Amazon Comprehend
   • Comprehend capabilities and service overview
   • Standard vs. Custom analysis
   • Entity recognition, key phrase extraction, and sentiment analysis
   • Document classification fundamentals
   • Learning Goals: Develop foundational knowledge of Comprehend's text analysis capabilities

Part 2: Document Extraction with Textract [INTERMEDIATE LEVEL]

1. Text Extraction and Document Structure
   • Raw text extraction techniques
   • Understanding document structure (blocks, lines, words)
   • Geometry and positional data
   • Handling multi-page documents
   • Learning Goals: Extract and work with text content from any document type