The Problem of Global Name Recognition in E-Discovery

as the world bEcomes flat e-Discovery Lawyers and investigators need to use global name recognition sOftware to pinpoint inDividuals And reduce false positIves and negatives

By Ira Rothken

Jul 25, 2015

The United States is a great melting pot of a multi-cultural world which is often reflected in the names of people who live and transact business there. Diversity of cultures in the US has manifested in a diversity of names that have not fit squarely in the "western" or "roman" first name, middle name, surname paradigm.

The lack of global consistency of human "names" create challenges in electronic investigations and e-discovery.

For example, many cultures have naming methods that differ from the United States such as the family name coming first. In addition, there are complications arising from non English alphabets where errors could be introduced from use of phonetics and transliteration. There can be multiple variations of the same individual's name across place like Asia or the Middle East. If you introduce misspellings the global name recognition problem is compounded.

How do you analyze in an automated fashion huge amounts of data to identify an individual if you do not know all the multi-cultural keywords or name variations for a particular individual?

There are a number of software products and databases that attempt to mitigate the global name recognition problem. For example IBM developed AI software for Global Name Recognition consisting at its core Global Name Management, Global Name Scoring, and Global Name Analytics. The IBM Global Name Recognition software uses over 20 years of linguistic research and analysis and provides robust information for given "input" foreign names including cultural classification, gender, and possible alternative westernized spellings.

In addition IBM's Global Name Recognition software helps discern spelling errors, provides for a huge multi-cultural knowledgebase, and ranks search results amongst other things. The result is a reduction in false positives and negatives in discerning targeted individuals.

In this connected world it would be wise for the electronic investigator and e-discovery attorney to have access to global name recognition software to save investigation time and money and to increase accuracy.