Analysis of postal address fields for efficient encoding of Korean mail pieces

A systematic approach for encoding Korean addresses to the finest depth of sort is presented in this paper. The implementation is focused on producing the final delivery point code for various types of address recognized in an efficient manner. There are two stages in the address interpretation: 1) agreement verification between the recognized postal code and upper part of the address and 2) analysis of lower part of the address which is important for the encoding. In the agreement verification procedure, the recognized postal code is used as a key to access the address dictionary and each of the retrieved addresses is compared with the words in the recognized address. As a result, the boundary between the upper part and the lower part is located. The confusion matrices are introduced to improve performance of the process by correcting misrecognized characters. In the procedure of interpreting the lower address part, a delivery point code is derived using the house number and/or the building name. Several rules for the interpretation have been developed based on the analysis of real addresses collected. Experiments have been performed to evaluate the proposed approach using addresses collected from two metropolitan cities in Korea.