Lightweight entity extraction engine

Extract entities based on a lexicon and/or library of patterns.

• Easy to use API
• High performance lexicon-based extraction, up to several hundred times faster than regex
• Utilizes Lucene analyzers to improve match results
• Java 8+

Usage

// create a lexicon
List<Entity> items = new ArrayList<>();
items.add(new DefaultEntity.Builder("John Smith").type("Person").build());
EntityBook entityBook = new EntityBook(items);

// create patterns
List<PatternDef> patterns = new ArrayList<>();
patterns.add(new PatternDef("[a-zA-Z0-9_.+-]+@[a-zA-Z0-9-]+\\.[a-zA-Z0-9-.]+", "Email", false));
PatternBook patternBook = new PatternBook(patterns);

//perform extraction
AggregateExtractor extractor = new AggregateExtractor();
ExtractionManifest manifest = extractor.extract(text, entityBook, patternBook);

for (ExtractionRegion region : manifest.getRegions()) {
    //do something with entities inside each region
}

Examples

The ner-example project contains two example programs, SigBlockExample and WonderlandExample, that illustrate extracting entities from text and using the results to mark up those entities in the document.