A Person-Name Filter for Automatic Compilation of Bilingual Person-Name Lexicons

This paper proposes a simple and fast person-name filter, which plays an important role in automatic compilation of a large bilingual person-name lexicon. This filter is based on pn score, which is the sum of two component scores, the score of the first name and that of the last name. Each score is calculated from two term sets: one is a dense set in which most of the members are person names; another is a baseline set that contains less person names. The pn score takes one of five values, {+2, +1, 0, −1, −2 }, which correspond to strong positive, positive, undecidable, negative, and strong negative, respectively. This pn score can be easily extended to bilingual pn score that takes one of nine values, by summing scores of two languages. Experimental results show that our method works well for monolingual person names in English and Japanese; the F-score of each language is 0.929 and 0.939, respectively. The performance of the bilingual person-name filter is better; the F-score is 0.955.