The Intelius Nickname Collection: Quantitative Analyses from Billions of Public Records

Although first names and nicknames in the United States have been well documented, there has been almost no quantitative analysis on the usage and association of these names amongst themselves. In this paper we introduce the Intelius Nickname Collection, a quantitative compilation of millions of namenickname associations based on information gathered from billions of public records. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest collection of its kind, making it a natural resource for tasks such as coreference resolution, record linkage, named entity recognition, people and expert search, information extraction, demographic and sociological studies, etc. The collection will be made freely available.