US Patent 11049204 Visual and text pattern matching

A method for automatically detecting block legal billing is described where the technique analyzes each billing entry in the legal bill for visual or textual aspects that indicate that a list of billing items is included in the block. The technique utilizes a combination of textual analysis for punctuation characters, count of the number of verbs, or a search for conjunctions. A visual analysis is match the image of the billing item with a predetermined image of a list. Essentially, a novel natural language processing technique is described that identifies lists in a block of text, where the block of text is in the context of a legal bill.