Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

Tools and libraries for matching Arabic names written in English Introduction: While working on my research, I needed to find a way to scan a set of Arabic and non-Arabic names written in English to find matches. This is especially difficult because you cannot count on the spelling of the name being consistent and distinct when written in a foreign language. Discrepancies between spellings, of the same name, may be due to the lack of name spelling standards, typos, translations, illiteracy, personal preferences, cultural differences, or all of the above. In this post, I discuss different approaches to solving this problem by using string matching and/or phonetic algorithms. The latter set of algorithms enable us to compare two strings based on how they sound, rather than how they are spelled, which is what the former set does. The real-world applications of names matching include Information Retrieval, Entity Recognition and Extraction, Natural Language Processing, Machine Translation...