About entity types

An entity type is a category of entity value. For example, the entity value John might be an example of the Given Name entity type.

Tonic Textual comes with a built-in set of entity types that it always detects.

You can also configure custom entity types, which you can use to detect values that are not covered by the built-in entity types.

When you create a custom entity type, you can either:

• Use regular expressions to identify matching values. You might create this type of custom entity when there are a limited number of values or the values follow specific formats that can easily be identified with a regular expression.

• Define and train a model to identify matching values. Training a model is an iterative process that can take hours or days, depending on your data. You might create this type of custom entity when there are a large number of values that do not follow a specific format. The values need to be identified more by context.

You can also view this video overview of entity types and entity type handling.