Hybrid Name Matching Methods for Rule Based Thai Naming System

Abstract

Names are important in many societies, even in technologically oriented ones whichuse ID systems or other ways to identify individual people. There are many elements ofpersonal names which vary in and between the different cultures. Names such as personalsurnames are the most important as they are used in many processes, such as identifying ofpeople, record linkage and for genealogical research as well. On the other hand, variation ofnames can be a major problem for the identification and search for people, e.g. web search orsecurity reasons. We show name variations for different cultures to guide the implementationof a rule based naming system, currently worked out for Thai names. We discusscharacteristics of the LIG (Levenshtein, Index of Similarity Group (called ISG), and Guth)algorithms which help to find reasonable variants of names. A further benefit of this processwould be an optimization for name searching.