HMM-based address parsing: efficiently parsing billions of addresses on MapReduce

Record linkage is the task of identifying which records in one or more data collections refer to the same entity, and address is one of the most commonly used fields in databases. Hence, segmentation of the raw addresses into a set of semantic fields is the primary step in this task. In this paper, we present a probabilistic address parsing system based on the Hidden Markov Model. We also introduce several novel approaches to build models for noisy real-world addresses, obtaining 95.6% F-measure. Furthermore, we demonstrate the viability and efficiency of this system for large-scale data by scaling it up to parse billions of addresses with Hadoop.