The Personal Name Problem and a Data Mining Solution

Almost every person has a life-long personal name which is officially recognised and has only one correct version in their language. Each personal name typically has two components/parts: a first name (also known as given, fore, or Christian name) and a last name (also known as family name or surname). Both these name components are strongly influenced by cultural, economic, historical, political, and social backgrounds. In most cases, each of these two components can have more than a single word and the first name is usually gender-specific. (see Figure 1). There are three important practical considerations for personal name analysis: • Balance between manual checking and analytical computing. Intuitively, a small proportion of names should be manually reviewed, the result has to be reasonably accurate, and each personal name should not take too long to be processed. • Reliability of the verification data has to be examined. By keeping the name verification database’s updating process separate from incoming names, it can prevent possible data manipulation/corruption over time. However, the incompatibility of names in databases can also be caused by genuine reasons as such as cultural and historical traditions, translation and transliteration, reporting and recording variations, and typographical and phonetic errors (Borgman and Siegfried, 1992).