Name Matching is Critical for Many Applications across Industries
Name Matching is a technology that matches names against a potentially large number of variants due to causes like spelling errors, nicknames, transliteration differences, and so on. There are many critical applications across different industry sectors that call for accurate name matching. For example:
- Homeland Security:
- Border security
- Law enforcement
- Visa application screening
- Healthcare:
- A single Arabic name can have different segmentations in English. These names are all the same in Arabic, but they can vary when brought into English:
- Abd al-Rahman vs. Abdul Rahman vs. Abdarrahman
- Spanish last names with both matronymics and patronymics can be shortened by dropping the maternal last name:
- Organization
- Place
- Address
- Vehicle
- Email Address
- Phone number
- Date
You want to check if a name matching tool handles the entity types that you need.
4. Can it handle matching of records with multiple fields?
Does your use case require that you match just names or do you need to match records with additional fields? For example, you may want to match not only a person’s name but also the person’s date of birth, place of birth, nationality, spouse, address, etc. If so, you want a product that takes matching results of all the relevant fields into consideration in an intelligent way.
5. Can it provide a matching score?
In many use cases, you will want to have a flexibility to set cut-off thresholds for matches. In some cases, the matching needs to be highly accurate, i.e., there should be few if any false positives. So you want to choose a higher matching score as a threshold. In others, the matching can be less stringent because you want to see more potential matches so as not to miss a match. In this case, you want to set the matching score lower.
6. How accurate is the matching?
Does it provide both low rates of false positives and false negatives? Sometimes a name matching tool will say two names are variants of each other when they are not (false positive) and, conversely, it does not find any match even if there is one (false negative). (Note: False negatives are harder to assess unless you have an answer key, i.e., for each name you want to match, you know all the possible variants in the name database searched against.)
High accuracy is critical because a high false positive rate would be overwhelming and cost time and money while a high false negative rate would lead to missed matches that could result in dire consequences.
7. How fast and scalable is the matching?
In many use cases, such as with matching air travelers against a terrorist watch list, the matching has to be real-time and scalable at peak travel times. In other cases, such as that of a marketing firm working to update a customer database, the matching can happen at a slower pace. Depending on your use case, you need to see if the name matching product addresses your speed and scalability requirements.
8. Is it customizable?
Your application domain may require some specific customizations beyond what the out-of-the-box name matching product offers. For example:
- You may need to handle unconventional name aliases, nicknames, or abbreviations.
- You want to specify certain field values that should be ignored for matching purposes.
- You want to change the weights of fields to alter matching behaviors.
If so, you need a name matching tool that allows you to customize in the ways that you require.
9. Does it support the languages you need?
In some use cases, there’s a requirement to match names in foreign scripts (Arabic, Chinese, Cyrillic, etc.) against names in Latin/English script, or vice versa. For example, a bank in the Middle East might have a database with names in Arabic script that have to be matched against such watch lists as OFAC in English.
Summary
Selecting a name matching product requires consideration of a number of factors as indicated above. You need to weigh them carefully and make the necessary trade-offs to get the functionality you desire.
- A single Arabic name can have different segmentations in English. These names are all the same in Arabic, but they can vary when brought into English:
