Corpus-Based Methods for Recognizing the Gender of Anthroponyms

Abstract

This paper presents a series of methods for automatically determining the gender of proper names, based on their co-occurrence with words and grammatical features in a large corpus. Although the results obtained were for Spanish given names, the method presented here can be easily replicated and used for names in other languages. Most methods reported in the literature use pre-existing lists of first names that require costly manual processing and tend to become quickly outdated. Instead, we propose using corpora. Doing so offers the possibility of obtaining real and up-to-date name-gender links. To test the effectiveness of our method, we explored various machine-learning methods as well as another method based on simple frequency of co-occurrence. The latter produced the best results: 93% precision and 88% recall on a database of ca. 10,000 mixed names. Our method can be applied to a variety of natural language processing tasks such as information extraction, machine translation, anaphora resolution or large-scale delivery or email correspondence, among others.

From Nordic to Hispanic - Shift in a Family’s Given Names

“…The motivation for focusing on this family tree is mainly practical and related to the availability of the material, but this case study allows us to gain concrete, in-depth knowledge about naming practices in a migrant context. Previous studies about naming have often had a more general focus with ample databases (e.g., García Gallarín, 2012;Nazar et al 2021) or etymological and orthographic classifications (Seide 2020). Naturally, these also reflect general sociohistorical tendencies, but case studies can add to our understanding of the changes on a more detailed level.…”