Relatedness of Given Names

As a result of the author’s need for help in finding a given name for the unborn baby, the Nameling1, a search engine for given names, based on data from the “Social Web” was born. Within less than six months, more than 35,000 users accessed Nameling with more than 300,000 search requests, underpinning the relevance of the underlying research questions. The present work proposes a new approach for discovering relations among given names, based on cooccurrences within Wikipedia. In particular, the task of finding relevant names for a given search query is considered as a ranking task and the performance of different measures of relatedness among given names are evaluated with respect to Nameling’s actual usage data. We will show that a modification for the PageRank algorithm overcomes limitations imposed by global network characteristics to preferential PageRank computations. By publishing the considered usage data, the research community is stipulated for developing advanced recommendation systems and analyzing influencing factors for the choice of a given name.