Text Mining to Fast-Track Deserving Disability Applicants

If your health and finances are sufficiently poor, the Social Security Administration will send you taxpayer dollars to help out. But, applying and qualifying can be a long and frustrating process - sometimes taking up to two years! In the meantime, your health and finances are undoubtedly worsening. (Likely the reason half of those appealing a rejection eventually get approved; the lack of timely help ensures their deterioration.) Yet, by mining the important text of the applications, the SSA can identify those most likely to be approved upon analyst review, and put them in a much more efficient fast track - helping all applicants. The solution involves text extraction, token collocation, Bayesian inference, and a new way to combine evidence.