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 are detected by default. These include the more common entity types such as names and locations.

Textual also provides a library of additional types that you can import into Textual and use in your datasets.

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

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

• Use regular expressions to identify matching values. You might use this option when there are a limited number of values, or if 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.