Vol. 69 No. 3 (2021)
Articles

Corpus-Based Methods for Recognizing the Gender of Anthroponyms

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  • Rogelio Nazar,
  • Irene Renau,
  • Nicolas Acosta,
  • Hernan Robledo,
  • Maha Soliman,
  • Sofıa Zamora
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5195/names.2021.2238

Published 2021-08-16

Keywords

  • anthroponymy,
  • co-occurrence statistics,
  • corpus linguistics,
  • gender recognition,
  • given names,
  • Spanish
    • ...More
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Copyright (c) 2021 Rogelio Nazar, Irene Renau, Nicolas Acosta, Hernan Robledo, Maha Soliman, Sof?a Zamora

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

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the literature use pre-existing lists of first names that require costly manual processing and tend to become quickly outdated.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.

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