used in the figures and may indicate similar or like functionality the figures depict embodiments of the disclosed system or method for purposes of illustration only one skilled in the art will readily recognize from the following description that alternative embodiments of the structures and methods illustrated herein may be employed without departing from the principles described herein in one embodiment it may be assumed that all entity instances can be presented in a tabular format for example one table may include an entity definition and another table may include entity records for example the tabular format can be illustrated using the by the following two tables entity definition entity id entity name 1 ssn 2 phone number 3 email address 4 account number 5 2 nd id 6 home address 7 credit card number 8 birth date 9 birth city 10 names the disclosure also introduces a concept called template each template includes one or more entities in its definition users can edit matching policies associated with each template to filter out the entity instances that are not necessarily interesting thus a policy engine also is a included in the architecture of named entity recognition engine the concept of template and entity combined can be described by the following schemes note that the entity definition includes a pattern presented by regular expression this is because a first tier entity match is solely built based on regular expression data extraction techniques for those.