Parallel Corpus Approach for Name Matching in Record Linkage

Record linkage, or entity resolution, is an important area of data mining. Name matching is a key component of systems for record linkage. Alternative spellings of the same name are a common occurrence in many applications. We use the largest collection of genealogy person records in the world together with user search query logs to build name-matching models. The procedure for building a crowd-sourced training set is outlined together with the presentation of our method. We cast the problem of learning alternative spellings as a machine translation problem at the character level. We use information retrieval evaluation methodology to show that this method substantially outperforms on our data a number of standard well known phonetic and string similarity methods in terms of precision and recall. Our result can lead to a significant practical impact in entity resolution applications.