Determining the Origin and Structure of Person Names

This paper presents a novel system HENNA (Hybrid Person Name Analyzer) for identifying language origin and analyzing linguistic structures of person names. We conduct ME-based classification methods for the language origin identification and achieve very promising performance. We will show that word-internal character sequences provide surprisingly strong evidence for predicting the language origin of person names. Our approach is context-, language- and domain-independent and can thus be easily adapted to person names in or from other languages. Furthermore, we provide a novel strategy to handle origin ambiguities or multiple origins in a name. HENNA also provides a person name parser for the analysis of linguistic and knowledge structures of person names. All the knowledge about a person name in HENNA is modelled in a person-name ontology, including relationships between language origins, linguistic features and grammars of person names of a specific language and interpretation of n...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: LREC
• Authors: Yu Fu, Feiyu Xu, Hans Uszkoreit
• Keywords: Education, Language Origins, LREC 2010, Person Name Analyzer, Person Names