Named Entity Recognition Grammars Package 26.2
Named Entity Recognition Grammars User Guide

# Data Sources

The PII grammars contain a variety of different kinds of entities to describe personally identifiable information that is protected by regulations such as GDPR. The following sections provide some information about how this information is compiled.

For all of these types of information, as much test data is acquired as possible to test the recall metric of the algorithms. Many millions of examples are run through the grammars to ensure that all patterns in usage are covered.

## Names

An international database containing over 100 million individuals is analyzed to identify the structure and characteristics of names in each country. In doing so, extensive lists of the frequencies of occurrence of given names and family names are used to generate strong identification grammars for names.

Other sources are also included for some countries, such as census data and lists of popular baby names. The list is also checked by performing Named Entity Recognition over a large corpus of public data to find forenames and surnames that result in too many false positives, and add them to a name stop list.

In addition, rules are included to handle linguistic information, such as transliteration (for example, from the Cyrillic or Greek alphabets), or the use or removal of diacritic marks.

## Date of Birth

A large corpus of documents from public sources is processed to analyze the occurrence and format of dates for each supported country. In this way, coverage of all common and less-common formats is built up, while enabling a likelihood measure to indicate the confidence that the characters identified are a date of birth, rather than an unrelated date or other alphanumeric string.

## Postal Codes

For each country, the publications of the national Postal Services are used as the authoritative source on the postal code.

In addition, testing against widely-gathered examples allows the identification and inclusion of non-standard formats and common errors (such as mixing the letter O with the digit 0), with an appropriately adjusted likelihood measure.

For countries where official sources are not available, public sources such as Wikipedia are used to source postal code formats.

## Addresses

The identification of addresses consists of a number of steps, each of which is used as additional evidence that a piece of text represents a postal address. These are:

1. The format of the text.
2. The house number / street-name portion.
3. The village / town / county / region portion.
4. The postal code.

These components are not necessarily always present for a particular address, but each is taken as evidence that the text does indeed contain an address, combining to form an overall likelihood.

- Few countries have prescribed formats for addresses, while most have conventions defined by the national Postal Service that is generally adhered to, but also frequently ignored.

  The Web Connector is used to gather many millions of web documents to identify candidate addresses in each applicable country. From there, the variety of formats that are used in practice are identified. In addition, any recommendations published by the national Postal Services are also used. The Universal Postal Union and other reputable sources are also used to generate and confirm address formats.

- For the street-address portion, the extensive OpenStreetMap project is used, and a database of every named street in each of the supported countries is obtained and analyzed. From this database, rules are derived to allow the identification of the vast majority of street-address strings.

- The de facto authority for geographical place names is the GeoNames database, with 11 million locations identified by data including country, population and type. In particular the type field is used to generate complete lists of populated settlements and administrative regions (such as county / department / region ) for the countries that frequently use those in addresses. In addition, the names are available in different character sets and transliteration schemes to ensure internationalization.

  Other official sources are also used to generate city, town, and region lists.

- The patterns derived for matching Postal Codes are also used here (see Postal Codes).

The patterns are tested by performing Named Entity Recognition on address lists generated from various online sources to ensure that recall is sufficiently high, to provide confidence that each address format is correct. These lists are also used to adjust the address format if required. In addition, the address grammars are tested against other public sources, such as Wikipedia articles, to ensure that the address formats do not return too many false positives.

## Telephone Number

The general schemes for the creation of telephone numbers and fax numbers are readily available from the appropriate government department of each country. However, the formats of such numbers when written down varies considerably within a country, and even more so when numbers are referred to in a foreign document.

The strategy for creating comprehensive phone number matching grammars is centered on several key methods:

- Knowledge of the national scheme for assigning numbers.
- Databases of international and area codes in each country, obtained from authoritative sources.
- Analysis of many millions of examples of the usage of telephone numbers, obtained from a wide variety of public sources.

This final point is the most important. Only through examination of real-world usage of such numbers is the full range of formats obtained for each country.

The proximity of keywords indicating that the digits represent a telephone or fax number is used to strengthen the likelihood of the match.

## National Identification Number

Each country has a different scheme for the use of National Identification. For countries with National ID cards, the format of the number is derived from governmental sources. In other countries, the formats of National Health, National Social Security, or National Insurance numbers are obtained from governmental sites, with the exception of a few cases in which other sources are used.

## Tax Identification Number (TIN)

Each country in the European Union uses a Tax Identification Number. Grammars are used to identify these using rules laid down by the European TIN Portal, published by the European Commission.

The strength of the format (that is, the likelihood of false positives) and the proximity of each format to key TIN-related terms allows the calculation of a likelihood measure, where high likelihood items are stronger indicators that a TIN is present, as opposed to an unrelated number that happens to be in the same format.

For other countries, TIN format information is gathered from a mixture of official sources, OECD, and public sources such as Wikipedia.

## Passport Number

The format of the national passport numbers is not as widely available as other such numbers. However, authoritative government documents are acquired for the formats of passport numbers in the majority of supported countries.

In other cases, non-governmental sources and the examination of examples have allowed grammars to be created for each country. In all cases, the presence of keywords and phrases in appropriate languages in proximity to the number are used to increase the likelihood of the match and to reduce the number of false positives.

In addition, grammars to identify Machine-Readable travel documents such as the MROTD and MRP have been added.

## Driving License

As with passport numbers, not all governments have published the scheme used in the numbering of Driving Licenses. The format of the number is obtained for the majority of relevant countries, with the remainder derived from secondary sources and from analysis of example numbers.

## Medical

Documents that contain mention of medical procedures or conditions are identified with the Medical categories, available in each of the supported languages. The categories are generated from the Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) taxonomy published by the United States National Library of Medicine using the C hierarchy (diseases and conditions). The medical terms are also extended using labels and aliases from public sources such as Wikipedia.

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Version 26.2 | Last updated April 2026

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Product: Named Entity Recognition Grammars Package 26.2

Topic Title: Data Sources