Acta Informatica Pragensia 2020, 9(2), 170-183 | DOI: 10.18267/j.aip.1394309

The Process of Unit Price Extraction from Public Sector Contracts

Tomáš Bruckner ORCID..., Filip Vencovský ORCID...
Department of Information Technologies, Faculty of Informatics and Statistics, Prague University of Economics and Business, W. Churchill Sq. 1938/4, 130 67 Prague, Czech Republic

Czech government institutions commissioned a research on extracting usual unit prices from public IT contracts to aid future public tender sizing. The goal of the project is to obtain millions of contracts from the public register, convert them to full text, extract unit prices from the text and publish a pricelist of IT industry manday prices. This paper designs the process and method of price extraction, demonstrates and evaluates the result on five iterations of extraction and discusses the experience of two years of project performance. The process is designed as a set of repeatable workflows and specified activity and role description. The method is designed as a combination of automated and manual actions. Due to the format and content variability of involved documents and the low mistake tolerance, the possibility of automated extraction of unit prices from full text contract is limited, and human workforce for validation is crucial.

Keywords: Usual price, Contracting, Full text analytics, Information technology, Business process

Received: August 24, 2020; Revised: October 1, 2020; Accepted: October 1, 2020; Prepublished online: October 1, 2020; Published: December 31, 2020  Show citation

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Bruckner, T., & Vencovský, F. (2020). The Process of Unit Price Extraction from Public Sector Contracts. Acta Informatica Pragensia, 9(2), 170-183. doi: 10.18267/j.aip.139
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