Automatic segmentation of text into structured records

In this paper we present a method for automatically segmenting unformatted text records into structured elements. Several useful data sources today are human-generated as continuous text whereas convenient usage requires the data to be organized as structured records. A prime motivation is the warehouse address cleaning problem of transforming dirty addresses stored in large corporate databases as a single text field into subfields like “City” and “Street”. Existing tools rely on hand-tuned, domain-specific rule-based systems.