Brand Pitt: A Corpus to Explore the Art of Naming

The name of a company or a brand is the key element to a successful business. A good name is able to state the area of competition and communicate the promise given to customers by evoking semantic associations. Although various resources provide distinct tips for inventing creative names, little research was carried out to investigate the linguistic aspects behind the naming mechanism. Besides, there might be latent methods that copywriters unconsciously use. In this paper, we describe the annotation task that we have conducted on a dataset of creative names collected from various resources to create a gold standard for linguistic creativity in naming. Based on the annotations, we compile common and latent methods of naming and explore the correlations among linguistic devices, provoked effects and business domains. This resource represents a starting point for a corpus based approach to explore the art of naming.