Get started with text analysis
Azure AI Language is a part of the Azure AI services offerings that can perform advanced natural language processing over unstructured text. Azure AI Language’s text analysis features include:
- Named entity recognition identifies people, places, events, and more. This feature can also be customized to extract custom categories.
- Entity linking identifies known entities together with a link to Wikipedia.
- Personal identifying information (PII) detection identifies personally sensitive information, including personal health information (PHI).
- Language detection identifies the language of the text and returns a language code such as “en” for English.
- Sentiment analysis and opinion mining identifies whether text is positive or negative.
- Summarization summarizes text by identifying the most important information.
- Key phrase extraction lists the main concepts from unstructured text.
Entity recognition and linking
You can provide Azure AI Language with unstructured text and it will return a list of entities in the text that it recognizes. An entity is an item of a particular type or a category; and in some cases, subtype, such as those as shown in the following table.Expand table
| Type | SubType | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Person | “Bill Gates”, “John” | |
| Location | “Paris”, “New York” | |
| Organization | “Microsoft” | |
| Quantity | Number | “6” or “six” |
| Quantity | Percentage | “25%” or “fifty percent” |
| Quantity | Ordinal | “1st” or “first” |
| Quantity | Age | “90 day old” or “30 years old” |
| Quantity | Currency | “10.99” |
| Quantity | Dimension | “10 miles”, “40 cm” |
| Quantity | Temperature | “45 degrees” |
| DateTime | “6:30PM February 4, 2012” | |
| DateTime | Date | “May 2nd, 2017” or “05/02/2017” |
| DateTime | Time | “8am” or “8:00” |
| DateTime | DateRange | “May 2nd to May 5th” |
| DateTime | TimeRange | “6pm to 7pm” |
| DateTime | Duration | “1 minute and 45 seconds” |
| DateTime | Set | “every Tuesday” |
| URL | “https://www.bing.com“ | |
“support@microsoft.com“ | ||
| US-based Phone Number | “(312) 555-0176” | |
| IP Address | “10.0.1.125” |
Azure AI Language also supports entity linking to help disambiguate entities by linking to a specific reference. For recognized entities, the service returns a URL for a relevant Wikipedia article.