A Guide To Address Parsing

Jun 7, 2024

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2 min read

Address parsing is the process of breaking down a postal address into its individual parts: the street name, building number, city, state, and postal code.

Address parsing extracts or structures data from unstructured or semi-structured address sources, making it easier to analyze, validate, or use the address information.

Forms often ask users to enter their address information in various formats. This leads to address data being stored in an unstructured way with different levels of consistency and accuracy.

For example, one user might enter their home address as “1234 Main St.” while their neighbor enters the address as “Mainstreet, 567”. From these two formats, it’s not readily apparent that these entries live next door.

Address parsing tools help troubleshoot these issues for e-commerce, banking, and healthcare organizations that need to store accurate billing, client, and patient data.

Address parsing can be done by hand or with the help of a software program. These software programs are typically open-source or proprietary.

An open-source address parsing tool is free to use and modify. These technologies are often developed by a community of developers. Furthermore, new features and bug fixes are added regularly.

Open-source tools can be a good option for businesses on a budget or wanting to have more control over the software they use.

However, open-source tools can be less user-friendly than proprietary tools. Also, they may not have the same level of support.

Proprietary address parsing tools are developed by a single company, with a schedule of new bugs and features to be released. Proprietary tools can be a good option for businesses that need a more reliable and user-friendly solution.

However, proprietary tools can be more difficult to customize, and they may not be as transparent as open-source tools.

Address parsing is often used with other data processing tasks, such as geocoding and address verification. In this guide, we’ll break down some of the best practices for using address parsing tools, the benefits these tools offer, and some real-world applications for address parsing.

Best Practices for Address Parsing

Address parsing can help ensure that addresses are entered correctly, improving the accuracy of mailings, deliveries, and other operations. To implement address parsing at your organization, develop a set of guidelines and procedures that help ensure accurate and consistent parsing of physical addresses.

These practices are designed to minimize errors and inconsistencies, improve efficiency and effectiveness, and ensure the reliable use of address data in various applications.

Data Cleaning, Address Standardization, and Preprocessing

Before you manually parse your address data or run your data through an address parsing tool, ensure the data is “clean.” That means you identify and correct any errors or typos, standardize address formats, and remove duplicate addresses.

In practice, manually standardizing addresses requires going row by row in a spreadsheet or document to check the format and spelling of each cell.

Normalize the address input by removing unnecessary characters, spaces, or punctuation. Standardize abbreviations and variations to ensure consistent parsing results. For example, convert "St" to "Street" and "Rd" to "Road" for better uniformity.

Likewise, some addresses may be inherently ambiguous, causing challenges for parsing algorithms. Create a strategy to handle these instances, such as leveraging additional contextual information, applying heuristics, or offering user prompts to clarify ambiguous elements.

This step is labor-intensive if you do it manually, but it will help improve the parsing process's accuracy. Alternatively, using address validation and verification tools that can speed up this process.

Address Validation and Verification

An address validation or verification tool can be used to check for errors in the address format. This can be helpful for normalizing your address data, ensuring the address exists, and standardizing addresses in a consistent format.

Address validation, or address verification, is the process of verifying that a physical address is valid and deliverable. It ensures that the recipient’s name, street name and number, city, state/province, zip/postal code, and country are correct.

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There are plenty of lightweight, user-friendly forms that can be added to a website to capture accurate address data.

Use of Advanced Address Parsing Tools

There are dozens of address parsing tools that can improve the address information you store. These tools automate the process using specialized software libraries or APIs that implement parsing algorithms and leverage reference data sources, such as address dictionaries or geospatial datasets, to improve accuracy and efficiency.

Instead of building an address parser from scratch, or doing it by hand, leverage established and trusted address parsing libraries or APIs. These tools are often continuously updated and maintained, ensuring better accuracy and handling of address variations.

In addition, consider using a geocoder service. Geocoding involves matching the provided address or place name against a geospatial database or reference data containing known location information.

The database may include street names, postal codes, landmarks, and other relevant information. By comparing the input data with the database, geocoding algorithms determine the most likely match or matches and assign the corresponding geographic coordinates.

A geocoding service can be used to verify the geographic location of an address. This can be helpful for identifying errors in the address format or for finding the geographic location of an address that does not have a standard format.

Regular Updating and Maintenance

Finally, like all software, you must regularly update and maintain your address information and address parsing tool.

Address formats and conventions can change over time. Stay updated with the latest address parsing rules and algorithms, and periodically review and update your parsing logic to account for any changes in address standards.

Likewise, test your results regularly to make sure the process still works well. You may need to make changes to the way you clean your data, the parsing approach, or the source of your data.

By following these best practices, you can help to improve the accuracy and efficiency of your address parsing process.

Real-World Applications of Address Parsing

Address parsing is helpful in any industry where address data is involved. It’s particularly crucial when large volumes of addresses need to be processed efficiently and accurately. Here are a few real-world applications where having a database of verified, standardized postal addresses is useful.

E-commerce and Shipping

E-commerce and shipping companies can use address parsing to verify and validate shipping addresses entered by customers.

For mail carriers, address parsing helps automate the process of extracting essential address components and validating them against postal standards, ensuring efficient handling and delivery.

This process helps reduce errors, prevent misdeliveries, and ensure a smooth order fulfillment process. Ultimately, address parsing can lower costs and improve customer satisfaction.

Banking and Finance

Financial institutions use address parsing to help prevent fraud. Address parsing tools are used as part of the identity verification process to assist in identifying potential discrepancies or fraudulent activities associated with addresses.

Other businesses utilize address parsing in market research and business intelligence. Address parsing helps analyze geographical distribution, customer segmentation, and market trends. It enables businesses to make data-informed decisions based on accurate address information.

Healthcare and Insurance

Address parsing plays a role in public safety: police, fire departments and ambulances use accurate addresses to locate incidents and respond quickly. Address parsing also provides mapping for emergency call-handling systems.

Insurance companies, like financial institutions, use address parsing to reduce the risk of fraud, improve compliance, and ensure homeowners insurance policies are accurate. Address parsing software can help the insurance company verify the correct address when a customer buys an insurance policy.

It can also help improve customer service: For example, if an agent needs to contact a policyholder about a claim, they can use the address parser to find the policyholder's phone number and email address.

Real Estate

Real estate agents can use address parsing to research properties by extracting information such as the property's value, square footage, and the number of bedrooms and bathrooms.

Using the right postal address, agents and their clients can find a wealth of information about the neighborhood, school system, comparable prices, and crime rates.

Address parsing is also a tool for lead generation in the real estate industry. This process can generate contact information from leads, such as their name, email address, and phone number.

Government and Public Services

A range of government agencies and public services need an accurate street address for their constituents.

The IRS and Social Security Administration, both of which send a high volume of mail, need accurate, standardized addresses to ensure their communications (including payments) are received.

The Census Bureau uses address parsing to conduct censuses and surveys to track population growth, demographic changes, and other important data points.

Locally, a postal address can help plan and zone land use – such as where to build schools, hospitals, and other infrastructure. Verifying and standardizing addresses can also help voter registration, emergency services, and other community planning.

Challenges and Limitations of Address Parsing

While there are many real-world use cases for address parsing, this process has shortcomings. Address parsing can be challenging due to the complexity of address data and the wide variety of address formats used worldwide.

Inconsistencies in Address Formats

Addresses vary in format and structure across different regions, countries, and cultures. There is no universal standard for address formats, making it difficult to create a single parsing algorithm that can handle all cases.

For instance, a package or letter being sent to an international address in Germany may not include the abbreviation for Deutschland, DE: “In items for Germany, on no account should a country code (D- or DE-) be written in front of the postcode. This could cause delay in processing the items as they cannot be sorted by the sorting machines.”

However, Italy requests that the mailing be labeled with “IT” or “Italy.”

Address parsing is more challenging for international addresses. This is because international addresses often contain different elements than addresses in the United States.

Ambiguity in Address Components

Address components such as street names, unit types, and directional indicators often have abbreviated forms or acronyms that can be ambiguous. For example, "St." can stand for "Street" or "Saint," and "Apt." can represent "Apartment" or "Aptitude."

Many address normalization algorithms can be set to change an address abbreviation to one thing, meaning you can change all instances of “St.” to “Street.” Then, you could run your address information through an address verification tool to ensure the address data is still accurate.

Language and Cultural Differences

In regions with multiple official languages or areas with diverse populations, addresses may appear in different languages. Parsing addresses in multiple languages introduces additional complexities due to language-specific grammar, word order, and address components.

Likewise, format, conventions, and parsing requirements can differ significantly across cultures and regions. International addresses may require specific parsing rules to accommodate local norms and practices, adding complexity to the process.

Data Quality and Availability

Address parsers can only work with the information fed to them. If an address is incomplete or inaccurate, the address parser may not parse it correctly.

It’s smart to use an address validation tool before you use a parser in order to make sure there’s no missing or incomplete information, such as missing postal codes or incomplete street names.

Limitations of Parsing Tools

Address parsing tools are improving all the time, but there remain limitations. This process can be computationally intensive, particularly when dealing with large datasets or real-time processing.

Achieving high parsing accuracy while maintaining reasonable processing speed can be challenging, especially considering the diverse nature of addresses.

Bottom line: Address parsing is not always 100% perfect. Address parsers are not always accurate and can make mistakes, especially if there are flaws in the address normalization process. Bad data will always net bad results.

Future of Address Parsing

Historically, address parsing software has used rule-based systems to complete the process. These systems rely on predefined rules to identify different components of an address: the street name, postal code, house number, city name, etc.

“While these systems can work well in some cases, they are often unreliable due to the wide range of address formats and the existence of spelling variations,” wrote AI Tech Trend.

Fortunately, new tools and technologies continue to impact the accuracy and efficiency of address parsing tools.

Advancements in Machine Learning

Advances in machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques, such as deep learning and neural networks, can enhance the accuracy of address parsing algorithms.

Machine learning algorithms, in particular, can be trained on large datasets of addresses to learn the patterns and relationships between different address components.

These techniques can help address parsing models learn from large datasets and improve their ability to handle variations, irregularities, and new address formats.

An adjacent technology that also shows promise is Natural Language Processing (NLP). NLP is a branch of AI that focuses on how computers can process language as humans do.

Leveraging NLP techniques can enable address parsing systems to understand better and interpret unstructured address data. NLP methods like named entity recognition, part-of-speech tagging, and syntactic parsing can assist in identifying and extracting address components more effectively.

Greater Standardization of Address Formats

Globalization has made international shipping standard practice. As a result, address parsing systems that can handle multiple languages and scripts will become increasingly common in our interconnected world.

These systems can parse addresses in different languages, including transliteration and translation capabilities, and adapt to diverse address formats and structures.

Future address parsing systems may focus on improving the handling of complex addresses, including rural addresses, post office box addresses, and addresses with unconventional structures. Specialized parsing rules and techniques can be developed to address the specific challenges these address types pose.

Integration with Other Technologies

Address parsing can benefit from integration with data quality solutions that help validate and enhance the accuracy of parsed addresses. These solutions can verify the existence of addresses, standardize formats, and identify potential errors or inconsistencies in the data.

The rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) also offers opportunities for integration with geocoding and geoparsing. As IoT devices and smart systems become more prevalent, accurate address parsing will be essential for location-based services, asset management, delivery logistics, and smart city initiatives.

Adaptation of Blockchain Technology

As data privacy and security concerns continue to grow, future address parsing systems will need to address these issues effectively. Blockchain is one potential solution for improving the accuracy and security of address data.

Blockchain uses a distributed ledger model. This makes it highly secure for storing address data, as multiple parties can access it without the risk of tampering. It’s also possible to verify address data by comparing data stored in government databases (or other reliable sources) with that stored on the blockchain.

In the future, address parsing tools could be used to extract data from the blockchain, providing a single source of truth for financial companies, governments, and businesses alike.

How would this work in practice? A decentralized address registry stored on the blockchain would make it possible to store address data securely without a central authority.

Agencies like the USPS could use this registry with address parsing to route mail more efficiently.

Increasing Importance of Address Data

Address data, also known as geospatial data, is becoming increasingly important for businesses and organizations. This information can be helpful for things like marketing, logistics, and emergency response.

Address parsers that integrate with geospatial data can give businesses and organizations a more complete view of their customers and operations.

Bottom Line

Address parsing has exciting implications for businesses across industries. As the technology develops, organizations of all sizes can look forward to improving their shipping and logistics, developing stronger marketing outreach, and reducing overhead costs associated with manually processing customer information.

Address parsing tools break down an address into its constituent components, such as street name, house number, city, postal code, and other relevant elements. When used with an address verification tool like Address Validator, address parsing software can accurately and efficiently send mail and packages, provide emergency services, plan for zoning and land use, and more.

Today’s address parsing tools are only as accurate as the data fed into them. Address Validator prevents invalid addresses and blocks undeliverable addresses from entering your data set. This ensures that your address parser only uses valid information.

The rise of machine learning, the increasing use of geospatial data, the growing importance of internationalization, and the increasing demand for efficiency are all factors that are likely to shape the future of address parsing.

Learn more about Address Validator and how it can help your e-commerce business improve its shipping, logistics, and customer fulfillment. Sign up to try it for free.

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Ellie Bradford

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In-Product Marketing Lead

November 12, 2024

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4 min read

A Guide To Address Parsing

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