When would this be useful?
Testing data, or creating character names for a story.
Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
11–20 of 105 posts
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#12It sort of sucks that the project has a domain name for a project name ("names.io") but you don't own the domain.
I went to the domain because the GitHub didn't describe the format of the data. So I'd also beef up the README.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#13Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name. My wife was annoyed when she came to the US and every form has a “first” and “last” field, but she doesn’t have a last name. Her passport for example, only has a “name” field.
Similar to this, some countries have two first and/or two last names. I had my share of trouble with government forms requiring to input the second names I don't have.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#14~160k first names ~100k last names Out of 7-8 billion people this is really all (or most) of the first and last names? We aren’t a very creative species I guess. I especially would have expected the number of first names to be at least an order of magnitude larger.
It's not. Not even close. It doesn't even have my last name for instance. And that's a western name. Then there's also the following issues: - The list contains mostly names in basic latin script, which already excludes most of the world population. - It's also pretty bold of the author to assume that everyone even has a "first" and a "last" name. Not all names work like that. - The list contains a bunch of extraneou…
You're right but I don't think staying accurate is all that important in this case. Judging by the "Features" section this seems to be mostly concerned with recognizing names in strings which means you can discard some extra information as long as you can still accurately match names without too many false positives. I can't say anything about exhaustiveness.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#15~160k first names ~100k last names Out of 7-8 billion people this is really all (or most) of the first and last names? We aren’t a very creative species I guess. I especially would have expected the number of first names to be at least an order of magnitude larger.
Many people prefer popular first names. For example, there are probably more than 150 million people with the first name Muhammad or some spelling variation thereof.
That has nothing to do with 'preferring a popular first name', that is a part of how people are named according to lineage in islam.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#16When would this be useful?
As a first heuristic for finding names in text I would imagine
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#17I have worked on projects where I needed to extract firstnames and lastnames and if you want to use this dataset to extract names, here are some caveats:
- firstnames can be lastnames as well
- common words can be names as well
- some stop words can be names
- the order can change, you can write firstname, lastname or lastname, firstname
- Some names are as short as one letter
Using ML can be useful if you can separate people by origin or in more homogeneous population.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#18Calling it exhaustive is a bit much. It doesn't have many names of my friends.
Here in India you get very long/sometimes weird lastnames. Many are not there on the list.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#19Somewhat related and worth pointing out is that the whole world does not use family names, or the family name as a last name. My wife was annoyed when she came to the US and every form has a “first” and “last” field, but she doesn’t have a last name. Her passport for example, only has a “name” field.
I think it's an "exhaustive" list under the limitations for those who do have a first and last name. Once you expand it to surnames and given names, it's a lot more complex.
Re: Names.io – Global Exhaustive Scraped Name Db
#20When would this be useful?
randombabynames.io