The remarkable success of GPT models across various tasks, including toponymy recognition motivates us to assess the performance of the GPT-3 model in the geocoding address parsing task. To ensure that the evaluation more accurately mirrors performance in real-world scenarios with diverse user input qualities and resolve the pressing need for a 'gold standard' evaluation dataset for geocoding systems, we introduce a benchmark dataset of low-quality address descriptions synthesized based on human input patterns mining from actual input logs of a geocoding system in production. This dataset has 21 different input errors and variations; contains over 239,000 address records that are uniquely selected from streets across all U.S. 50 states and D.C.; and consists of three subsets to be used as training, validation, and testing sets. Building on this, we train and gauge the performance of the GPT-3 model in extracting address components, contrasting its performance with transformer-based and LSTM-based models. The evaluation results indicate that Bidirectional LSTM-CRF model has achieved the best performance over these transformer-based models and GPT-3 model. Transformer-based models demonstrate very comparable results compared to the Bidirectional LSTM-CRF model. The GPT-3 model, though trailing in performance, showcases potential in the address parsing task with few-shot examples, exhibiting room for improvement with additional fine-tuning. We open source the code and data of this presented benchmark so that researchers can utilize it for future model development or extend it to evaluate similar tasks, such as document geocoding.

Segmenting an address into meaningful components, also known as address parsing, is an essential step in many applications from record linkage to geocoding and package delivery. Consequently, a lot of work has been dedicated to develop accurate address parsing techniques, with machine learning and neural network methods leading the state-of-the-art scoreboard. However, most of the work on address parsing has been confined to academic endeavours with little availability of free and easy-to-use open-source solutions. This paper presents Deepparse, a Python open-source, extendable, fine-tunable address parsing solution under LGPL-3.0 licence to parse multinational addresses using state-of-the-art deep learning algorithms and evaluated on over 60 countries. It can parse addresses written in any language and use any address standard. The pre-trained model achieves average $99~\%$ parsing accuracies on the countries used for training with no pre-processing nor post-processing needed. Moreover, the library supports fine-tuning with new data to generate a custom address parser.