Entity Extractions

Entity extraction identifies particular patterns from data, such as text, images, or audio materials. It has been used to identify a person’s addresses, vehicles, and personal characteristics, which means that entity extraction can provide basic information for crime analysis.

In criminal justice, as in other fields, such as business, there is a need for collecting and understanding web information about a real- world entity—a person of interest or a suspect, for example. For most of us, if we want to find out more about a person, we use a search engine. However, if you do a Google or Yahoo search to learn more about an individual (say, Mark Robinson, to pick a name at random), you will get 174 million hits. To learn more about the particular Mark Robinson you might be interested in would mean that you would have to scroll through thousands of web pages. Even if Google or any other search engine could find all the relevant web pages about Mark Robinson, how long would it take you to sift through all these pages to get a complete view of who Mark Robinson is? A few hours? A few days? Maybe. But it might take even longer.

Entity extraction works at solving this problem. Microsoft came up with EntityCube to help to search and browse summaries of entities, including people, organizations, and locations.

Software such as EntityCube or Rosette Entry Extractor (REX) automatically mine from billions of web pages to extract entity information and detect relationships, covering a spectrum of everyday individuals and well-known people, locations, conferences, journals, and organizations.