mailwoman

mailwoman

A calibrated, retrieval-augmented postal-address parser.

Mailwoman parses free-text postal addresses into structured components (house number, street, locality, region, postcode, country, …) and resolves them to coordinates via a gazetteer. It is the user-facing CLI and library entry point for the Mailwoman ecosystem.

# CLI — parse an address
npx mailwoman parse "1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043"

// Library — parse programmatically
import { createRuntimePipeline, decodeAsJson } from "mailwoman"
import { NeuralAddressClassifier } from "@mailwoman/neural"

const classifier = await NeuralAddressClassifier.loadFromWeights({ locale: "en-US" })
const parse = createRuntimePipeline({ classifier })

const { tree } = await parse("1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043")
console.log(decodeAsJson(tree))
// { region: "CA", locality: "Mountain View", street: "Amphitheatre",
//   house_number: "1600", street_suffix: "Parkway", postcode: "94043" }

What it does

Mailwoman is not an LLM and nothing about it is generative. It is a small transformer encoder (~30M params) doing BIO token classification over a 33-label address schema — boring NER, which is a feature for short, structured strings.

The design splits the problem in two:

• The model learns the grammar — a sequence labeler trained from scratch on a diverse corpus of real and synthetic addresses.
• The gazetteer knows the atlas — a provenance-tracked Who's On First database that resolves parsed components to real-world places and coordinates.

Knowledge arrives at inference as soft input features (anchors) — it informs, never overrides. If you know RAG from the LLM world, this is RAG for token classification.

Installation

# Parser: CLI + neural runtime + US-English model weights
npm install mailwoman @mailwoman/neural @mailwoman/neural-weights-en-us

# Optional: coordinate resolution (the `geocode` command + `--resolve`)
npm install @mailwoman/resolver-wof-sqlite

# Optional: French model
npm install @mailwoman/neural-weights-fr-fr

Requires Node.js ≥ 22.5.1. Without a neural-weights-* package the CLI still runs but falls back to the legacy rule parser (weaker); install the weights to use the neural model.

CLI

# Parse an address
mailwoman parse "123 Main St, Springfield, IL 62701"

# Parse with explicit locale
mailwoman parse "10 Rue de la Paix, 75002 Paris" --locale fr-FR

# Geocode an address (requires @mailwoman/resolver-wof-sqlite)
mailwoman geocode "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043"

# Entity resolution (dedup / cross-dataset matching)
mailwoman registry --sources config.json --out entities.geojson

# Interactive TUI
mailwoman parse --tui

Library API

You supply a neural classifier loaded from a weights package; createRuntimePipeline wires up normalization, locale detection, kind classification, phrase grouping, and token classification with production-ready defaults.

import { createRuntimePipeline, decodeAsJson, decodeAsTuples } from "mailwoman"
import { NeuralAddressClassifier } from "@mailwoman/neural"

const classifier = await NeuralAddressClassifier.loadFromWeights({ locale: "en-US" })
const parse = createRuntimePipeline({ classifier })

const result = await parse("350 5th Ave, New York, NY 10118")

result is a PipelineResult:

result.tree // the parsed address as a hierarchical AddressTree
result.kind // { kind: "structured_address" | "postcode_only" | "locality_only" | …, confidence }
result.locale // detected (or asserted) locale
result.queryShape // structural input priors
result.timing // per-stage wall-clock breakdown

Project the tree into the shape you need:

decodeAsJson(result.tree)
// { region: "NY", locality: "New York", street: "5th",
//   house_number: "350", street_suffix: "Ave", postcode: "10118" }

decodeAsTuples(result.tree)
// [["house_number", "350"], ["street", "5th"], …]

The tree is hierarchical and carries calibrated confidence per node:

for (const root of result.tree.roots) {
	console.log(`${root.tag}: "${root.value}" (${root.confidence.toFixed(2)})`)
	// region: "NY" (0.91) — locality, street, house_number, postcode nest beneath it
}

Confidence calibration ships with the weights: loadFromWeights applies the bundled per-locale calibrator, so node confidences are calibrated probabilities (a 0.88 is right about 88% of the time), not raw scores.

Options

Factory options configure the pipeline; per-call PipelineOpts tune a single parse. The ones you'll reach for most:

const parse = createRuntimePipeline({
	classifier,
	resolver, // optional — see "Geocoding" below
	normalizeCase: true, // title-case detected all-caps input before the model (default: off)
})

await parse("350 5TH AVE, NEW YORK, NY 10118", {
	locale: "en-US", // assert a locale instead of detecting it
	hardPlaceCountry: true, // confine resolution to a confidently-detected country (default: on)
	jointReconcile: false, // beam-search decode instead of argmax (default: off)
	arbitrate: false, // union the neural parse with the legacy rule parse (default: off)
})

Geocoding

Resolution turns parsed components into a Who's On First place ID and coordinate. It needs a gazetteer SQLite database — build one with the bundled mailwoman-wof-build-slim + mailwoman-wof-build-fts tools, or point at a prebuilt shard. The resolver is administrative/postcode-level, not rooftop: it returns place centroids (locality, region, postcode), not delivery-point coordinates.

# CLI — resolve while parsing, or geocode directly
mailwoman parse "350 5th Ave, New York, NY 10118" --resolve --resolve-db ./wof.sqlite
mailwoman geocode "1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy, Mountain View, CA 94043"

Programmatically, build a WofSqlitePlaceLookup backend (from @mailwoman/resolver-wof-sqlite), pass it to createWOFResolver (from @mailwoman/resolver), and hand the resolver to createRuntimePipeline({ classifier, resolver }). The resolved result.tree roots then carry a wof:id and coordinate. See Getting started → Adding resolution for the worked example.

Architecture

Mailwoman's runtime pipeline is a staged coordinator:

normalize → query-shape → locale-gate → kind-classifier → phrase-grouper → classifier → decoder

Each stage is published as its own @mailwoman/* package. The mailwoman package is the umbrella that wires them together as a single npm install.

Packages

Package	Role
mailwoman	CLI + AddressParser (you are here)
@mailwoman/core	Types, pipeline coordinator, decoder, dictionaries
@mailwoman/neural	SentencePiece tokenizer + ONNX runtime
@mailwoman/neural-weights-en-us	Trained model bundle (en-US)
@mailwoman/neural-weights-fr-fr	Trained model bundle (fr-FR)
@mailwoman/normalize	Stage 1: input preprocessing
@mailwoman/query-shape	Stage 1.5: structural priors
@mailwoman/locale-gate	Stage 2: locale detection
@mailwoman/kind-classifier	Stage 2.5: query kind classification
@mailwoman/phrase-grouper	Stage 2.7: phrase boundary discovery
@mailwoman/classifiers	Rule-based classifiers
@mailwoman/codex	Postal reference data
@mailwoman/corpus	Training corpus pipeline
@mailwoman/spatial	Spatial utilities
@mailwoman/formatter	Address formatting + match key
@mailwoman/record	Record schema + normalizers
@mailwoman/match	Block → score → cluster matcher
@mailwoman/address-id	Stable address primary key
@mailwoman/registry	Entity resolution application

Related

• Documentation & blog
• What Mailwoman Is
• GitHub

License

Dual-licensed: AGPL-3.0-only for open-source use, or a commercial license for closed-source use without the AGPL's source-sharing obligation (contact teffen@sister.software). Portions derived from Pelias Parser remain under MIT, and @mailwoman/core bundles third-party reference data under its own terms — see THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.