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Multilingual Street-Type Normalization Dictionary

Source: R/data.R
street_types.Rd

A curated cross-linguistic dictionary of street-type forms used for robust address standardization and record linkage. Each entry maps a variant - including abbreviations, orthographic alternatives, morphological forms, and transliterated spellings - to a canonical street-type label.

Usage

street_types

Format

An object of class tbl_df (inherits from tbl, data.frame) with 143 rows and 4 columns.

Source

Manually curated based on postal conventions, open datasets, and commonly observed street-name variations across languages. The dictionary is periodically expanded as new variants are encountered in real-world data.

Details

Unlike simple suffix lists, this dictionary encodes language-specific normalization rules. Each variant is marked as either:

  • "exact" - the variant should only match a token when it appears exactly, e.g. "st." -> "STREET" (English), "pl" -> "PLAZA" (Spanish)

  • "suffix" - the variant may safely match a token ending with that sequence, e.g. "gatan" -> "GATA" (Swedish), "strasse" -> "STRASSE" (German)

By separating exact vs. suffix behaviour and tagging each entry with an ISO language code, joinery can normalize addresses without incorrect transformations (e.g. preventing "LINCOLN" -> "LANE", or "VICTOR" -> "RUE"). This structure enables high-precision multilingual address cleaning.

Languages Covered

The dictionary currently includes major street-type systems from:

  • German - Straße, Gasse, Weg, Platz, Allee, etc.

  • English - Street, Road, Avenue, Boulevard, Lane, etc.

  • French - Rue, Avenue, Boulevard, Impasse, Quai, Chemin, etc.

  • Spanish - Calle, Avenida, Paseo, Plaza, Camino, etc.

  • Italian - Via, Piazza, Corso, Viale, etc.

  • Portuguese - Rua, Avenida, Praça, Alameda, Travessa, etc.

  • Polish - Ulica, Aleja, Plac, Osiedle, etc.

  • Dutch - Straat, Laan, Weg, Plein, etc.

  • Turkish - Sokak, Cadde, Bulvar, Meydan, etc.

  • Swedish - Gata, Gatan, Vägen, Torg, etc.

  • Danish/Norwegian - Gade, Vej, Plads, etc.

  • Greek (transliterated) - Odos, Leoforos, Plateia

  • Russian (transliterated) - Ulitsa, Prospekt, Pereulok, etc.

Additional languages and street-type systems can be incorporated as needed.

Use in normalize_street()

street_types is used by normalize_street() to:

  • standardize street-type tokens to a canonical form,

  • optionally apply language-specific suffix rules (lang = "de", "sv", etc.),

  • avoid over-normalization by matching only valid variants for the specified language,

  • support multilingual cleaning workflows in data preprocessing and record linkage.

Format

A tibble with four columns:

canonical

Character string. The standardized street-type label in uppercase ASCII (e.g. "STRASSE", "AVENUE", "PLAC").

variant

Character string. A lowercase spelling, abbreviation, transliteration, or inflected form seen in raw address data (e.g. "str.", "straße", "avda", "gatan").

type

Either "exact" or "suffix", indicating whether the variant should match only whole tokens or may safely match as a word-final suffix.

lang

ISO 639-1 language code (e.g. "de", "en", "fr", "sv"), used to restrict normalization to the appropriate street-type system.