Thesaurus of British Surnames

Links: Surname Variation & Matching

Name Matching

• A. J. Lait and B. Randell An Assessment of Name Matching Algorithms
• Bruce Despain Processing Personal Names: A methodology for the study of Onomastics
• Onomastix White Papers on apsects of surname matching:
  • Is Soundex Good Enough for You? On the Hidden Risks of Soundex-Based Name Searching
  • The Use of Phonological Information in Automatic Name Searching
  • Whose Name Is It? Names, Ownership and Databases
  • Measuring Phonological Similarity: The Case of Personal Names

Record Linkage & De-duplication

• Chakkrit Snae and Bernard Diaz An interface for mining genealogical nominal data using the concept of linkage and a hybrid name matching algorithm [PDF]
• Chakkrit Snae An Investigation of Linkage in Nominal Data
• Ox-link - the Oxford Medical Record Linkage System
• Advanced Name-Matching Techniques for Immunization Registries [PDF]
• Matchmaker, Mitchmoker - is that a Match? Or De-mystifying De-duplication

Soundex

• NARA The Soundex Indexing System
• Peter Christian Soundex - Can it be improved? [PDF], with follow up in Soundex Update
• Alan Stanier, "How accurate is Soundex matching"

Pronunciation Algorithms

• M Divay and AJ VitaleAlgorithms for Grapheme-Phoneme Translation for English and French: Applications [PDF]
• Ariadna Font Llitjós Improving Pronunciation Accuracy of Proper Names with Language Origin Classes (MA thesis, Carnegie Mellon University) - includes an interesting (and not particularly technical) overview of the problems of mapping letters to sounds, and some of the approaches that have been tried.
• Julie Ngan, Aravind Ganapathiraju, Joseph Picone Improved Surname Pronunciations Using Decision Trees [PDF]

General Surname Sites

• Philip Dance Modern British Surnames

If you have any suggestions for useful links that could be added to this page, please mail Peter Christian, peter@spub.co.uk.

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9th May 2003, Peter Christian