Computer recognition of Sanskrit-based Indian names

An interesting problem relating to cognition oriented task of humans is the name recognition problem. Humans are so apt in performing this task that they hardly realise the difficulties involved in it. Formally, name recognition means identifying the native origin of people from their names. A subproblem of this task is to classify whether a name belongs to one’s own country or not. The authors analyze and then formalize the procedure followed by humans to perform this task. An expert system for recognizing names of persons of Indian origin is then described. The system is based on the phonetic information contained in the name, which in turn depends upon the language of the corresponding country (in our case, Sanskrit).