What is Entity Extraction and Why Should You Care?
Entity extraction, aka. “entity recognition”, allows computer systems to grab chunks of data from documents and enter them into separate fields in a database. For instance, they can sort through emails, webpages, or even massive WikiLeaks documents and find names, places, addresses, phone numbers, or key phrases and sort them into useful databases.
Entity extraction uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) to find mentions of specific data and turn them into structured data. How this data is used can be either “good” or “bad,” depending on your frame of reference. Government agencies can use it to sort through massive quantities of data to track down terrorists. Advertisers can use it to target you with ads that you might be interested in and not show you advertisements that are just a waste of your time. And thieves and scammers can use it to find potential targets.
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