The knowledge ladder explains why the v0.5.0 pipeline grew two new information layers (Stage 2.7 phrase grouper, expanded Stage 5 reconcile). This article walks through what they actually do on one concrete input, end-to-end.
Some places are two things at once. Berlin is a city and a federal state. Milano is a comune and the province named after it. Bristol is a city and a unitary authority. Utrecht is a city and a province. A census of our gazetteer found about 122 of these across nine countries — Italy alone has 70 (its provinces are nearly all named after their capital), then Spain (14), the UK (12), Japan (10), Korea (7), and a handful each for France, Germany, the Netherlands, and China.
The falsehoods
Users do not type addresses the way gazetteers store them. They type what they know, in the order they think of it, with the spellings their keyboard supports, trusting autocomplete suggestions they didn't verify. A parser that only handles well-formed addresses fails on real input.
Parse only the locality — the city, town, or village. Everything else is supplementary. Geocode to city-level accuracy. This is sufficient for statistical aggregation, market analysis, regional routing, and most applications that don't need to find a specific building.
Parsing answers "what kind of thing is each part of this string?". Resolving answers "where is the resulting place?". They are different jobs and Mailwoman keeps them apart on purpose.
In Mailwoman's architecture, a concordance is the resolver's answer to the question: "Do these parsed components form a coherent place in the real world?" It is the mechanism that prevents the parser from emitting a parse that is structurally valid but geographically impossible — like "Paris, Texas" labelled as "Paris, Île-de-France" or "NY-NY Steakhouse, Houston TX" with "NY" tagged as a region.