Preview API changes

Use this article to get an overview of the new API changes starting from 2023-04-15-preview version. This API change mainly introduces two new concepts (entity types and entity tags) replacing the category and subcategory fields in the current Generally Available API. A detailed overview of each API parameter and the supported API versions it corresponds to can be found on the [Skill Parameters][../how-to/skill-parameters.md] page

Entity types

Entity types represent the lowest (or finest) granularity at which the entity has been detected and can be considered to be the base class that has been detected.

Entity tags

Entity tags are used to further identify an entity where a detected entity is tagged by the entity type and additional tags to differentiate the identified entity. The entity tags list could be considered to include categories, subcategories, sub-subcategories, and so on.

Changes from generally available API to preview API

The changes introduce better flexibility for the named entity recognition service, including:

Updates to the structure of input formats: • InclusionList • ExclusionList • Overlap policy

Updates to the handling of output formats:

  • More granular entity recognition outputs through introducing the tags list where an entity could be tagged by more than one entity tag.
  • Overlapping entities where entities could be recognized as more than one entity type and if so, this entity would be returned twice. If an entity was recognized to belong to two entity tags under the same entity type, both entity tags are returned in the tags list.
  • Filtering entities using entity tags, you can learn more about this by navigating to this article.
  • Metadata Objects which contain additional information about the entity but currently only act as a wrapper for the existing entity resolution feature. You can learn more about this new feature here.

Generally available to preview API entity mappings

You can see a comparison between the structure of the entity categories/types in the Supported Named Entity Recognition (NER) entity categories and entity types article. Below is a table describing the mappings between the results you would expect to see from the Generally Available API and the Preview API.

Type Tags
Date Temporal, Date
DateRange Temporal, DateRange
DateTime Temporal, DateTime
DateTimeRange Temporal, DateTimeRange
Duration Temporal, Duration
SetTemporal Temporal, SetTemporal
Time Temporal, Time
TimeRange Temporal, TimeRange
City GPE, Location, City
State GPE, Location, State
CountryRegion GPE, Location, CountryRegion
Continent GPE, Location, Continent
GPE Location, GPE
Location Location
Airport Structural, Location
Structural Location, Structural
Geological Location, Geological
Age Numeric, Age
Currency Numeric, Currency
Number Numeric, Number
PhoneNumber PhoneNumber
NumberRange Numeric, NumberRange
Percentage Numeric, Percentage
Ordinal Numeric, Ordinal
Temperature Numeric, Dimension, Temperature
Speed Numeric, Dimension, Speed
Weight Numeric, Dimension, Weight
Height Numeric, Dimension, Height
Length Numeric, Dimension, Length
Volume Numeric, Dimension, Volume
Area Numeric, Dimension, Area
Information Numeric, Dimension, Information
Address Address
Person Person
PersonType PersonType
Organization Organization
Product Product
ComputingProduct Product, ComputingProduct
IP IP
Email Email
URL URL
Skill Skill
Event Event
CulturalEvent Event, CulturalEvent
SportsEvent Event, SportsEvent
NaturalEvent Event, NaturalEvent