Free-text parsing is a facility that can be used to examine and extract information from blocks of text. Parsing is invoked from activities that can be run from within other activities or flows. See Appendix C, Text Parsing Rules, for detailed information about the rules used for text parsing.

Two mechanisms are available to invoke text parsing:

• Text-Normalize —The Normalize function allows users to substitute one text string for a number of others to standardize formats (such as dates or currency) or text patterns (such as reference numbers).
• Text-Infer —The Infer method processes a collection of transform rules against the subject block of text and stops as soon as a specified pattern is detected. The transform rules detect text patterns using regular expressions, and return the results or a transformed result, based upon the transform rule.

Smart Investigate for Payments uses flows as control records to manage text parsing. Each flow links together the values to be parsed, with each value being located by a separate activity. (The only exception is processes that locate work types, where each work type — Unable to Apply, Beneficiary Claims Non-Receipt, and so forth — should be its own activity.) Whether the next activity is called depends on the success of its predecessor.

The following diagram shows an example of a free-text parsing flow and its component activities.