I haven’t really found anything with any preliminary google searches.
So - has there ever been any work done on this?
How well would a neural network fair against regular expression pattern matching?
Say - for email addresses? Would it be possible to build a NN that would outperform regex?
Just a passing thought - yes, I’m at that phase in a project right now - gotta love form validation.
Anyway - just wanted to get some opinions. 
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Hi @CreationTribe,
Yes it would be possible to train a neural network as a classifier for email addresses. There are simple regex’s for email addresses that are 100% successful, so the neural network would naturally not perform as well as this. However the neural net would not have to be given the definition of a valid email address, it would approximate it via all the samples you provide.
The reason nobody would be doing it is because email address is a human invention that we have a simple formal definition of, so NN’s are unnecessary in this scenario.
That said, there are plenty of software vendors out there using regex’s and calling it AI 
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