Detecting people’s names is part and parcel of PII discovery. Traditional techniques like regexp and keywords don’t work because the set of all names is too varied. How do open-source Named Entity Recognition (NER) engines compare, and can we do better? Part 1 deals with NER results and benchmarks, while Part 2 discusses technical neural network details. Or download the … Read More
The What, Why, and How of PII Auditing
You’ve heard stories of companies running into trouble by not maintaining PII compliance and suffering severe legal ramifications. But what does that mean for you? Out of all the data you have, you’re sure you don’t have any PII lurking around in unwanted or even unlawful areas, right…? Ready or not, your next scheduled PII audit is around the corner. … Read More
Detect person names in text: Part 2 (Technical)
In Detect Person Names in Text: Part 1 (Results), we benchmarked our new named entity recognizer (NER) against popular open source alternatives, such as Stanford NER, Stanza and SpaCy. Today we dig a little deeper into the NER architecture and technical details. First, recall our main NER objectives. In short, we require our NER to be practical, rather than just … Read More
