Producing
The shape you impose
The same information reaches you in twenty different shapes: emails, minutes, notes taken in meetings.
How it goes
do it yourself- Write the table you want filled in first: the columns, what each accepts, and the value to use when the information is absent.
- Give the shape BEFORE the material, and require an unknown cell to carry the agreed value rather than a plausible one.
- Run three documents through it, then look only at the cells marked unknown.
The instruction, word for word
copy it, then correct itExtract the information below into this exact shape, one row per commitment found: what | the commitment, one sentence, present tense who | the person named in the text, otherwise "unknown" when | a date as YYYY-MM-DD, otherwise "unknown" condition | what the commitment depends on, otherwise "none" source | the exact sentence from the document, in quotes Rules: - if something is not in the text, write "unknown". Never infer a date from surrounding context; - "source" is mandatory: do not produce a row you cannot quote; - do not merge two commitments into one. --- document below ---
- “otherwise unknown”
- The agreed value. It is what makes absence visible; without it, an empty cell and a guessed one look the same.
- “Never infer a date”
- Date inference is the most frequent and most expensive kind of filling in: “next month” becomes a precise, wrong date.
- The “source” column
- It makes every row checkable in three seconds. That is what turns an extraction into something usable.
- The closing separator
- The shape comes before the material: given afterwards, it reads as a remark about work already done.
What you get out of it
Output you can paste into a spreadsheet without reading it line by line. The “unknown” value makes all the difference: without it, a missing piece of information fills itself in with something believable, and nothing in the output says so.
Going further
Count the unknowns across your three documents. A column that comes back unknown all three times is not a column: it is information your material does not hold, and you have to go and get it elsewhere.