Configuring Entities

We will use an insurance use-case as our example. The insurer mailbox receives emails from brokers that should be triaged to different teams for processing. In this example the dataset has already been trained and the taxonomy looks like this:

Figure 1. Example Taxonomy

This mailbox receives Renewal, Cancellation, and Admin requests which are occasionally Urgent. Communications Mining has been trained to recognize each of these concepts, and Communications Mining predictions can be used to triage the emails to the correct team by creating support tickets.

To ensure that the customer is responded to quickly, we can extract some key data points that will help the downstream teams process the request. Specifically, we want to extract the policy number, insured organization name, and broker name from the email. We can use entity extraction to do that.

Figure 2. Configured Entities

Since the policy number format is specific to this particular insurer, we configure the entity to be trainable from scratch. On the other hand, the insured organization is a type of organization, so we configure it to be trainable based on the built-in Organization entity. Finally, we notice that brokers don't always put their name into the email, so we decide to use the broker email address (available from the comment metadata) to look up the corresponding name in an internal database, rather than extracting it as an entity.

The table below summarizes these approaches.

CONFIGURATION	WHEN TO USE	EXAMPLES
Trainable entity with no base entity	Most often used for various kinds of internal IDs, or when there is no suitable base entity in Communications Mining.	Policy Number, Customer ID
Trainable entity with base entity	Used for customizing an existing pre-built entity in Communications Mining.	Cancellation Date (based on Date), Insured Organization (based on Organization)
Pre-built entities (not trainable)	Used for entities that should be matched exactly as defined, where training would invite mistakes.	ISIN
Using comment metadata instead of entities	Used when required information is already present in structured form in the comment metadata.	Sender Address, Sender Domain