A Comparison of Personal Name Matching: Techniques and Practical Issues

Finding and matching personal names is at the core of an increasing number of applications: from text and Web mining, search engines, to information extraction, deduplication and data linkage systems. Variations and errors in names make exact string matching problematic, and approximate matching techniques have to be applied. When compared to general text, however, personal names have different characteristics that need to be considered. In this paper, we discuss the characteristics of personal names and present potential sources of variations and errors. We then overview a comprehensive number of commonly used, as well as some recently developed name matching techniques. Experimental comparisons using four large name data sets indicate that there is no clear best matching technique