how to get database of all people's names (or at least English common ones)?

Question

Hi,

I'm designing an application that need to extract people's names from short texts.

What is the best way to do that? is there a database of names where I can test to know where is the name? the fact that the text is short it might not be as intensive in terms of processing needs.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Tam

Answer 1

You can use a statistical Named Entity Recognizer (NER), such as Stanford's NER, or LingPipe's. These are machine learning-based recognizers, that do not require huge dictionaries of names as input.

Alternatively, you can get a list of person names from the Web (there are plenty), and use the Aho-Corasick string searching algorithm to efficiently extract names from the list from text.

Answer 2

If you're on a *nix system, try looking at /usr/share/dict/propernames. Mac OS X has it, and I think at least Ubuntu does too.

You could use this with grep:

grep -f /usr/share/dict/propernames short_text.txt

Answer 3

I found this reference: Extracting people’s names from RSS feeds using WordNet

Answer 4

How about US census bureau genealogy data