Normalizing Surnames
Revision as of 23:58, 16 June 2009 by imported>Ed (→Encodings)
Encodings
Surnames can be represented in many different encodings. For comparison purposes, it is convenient to have surnames encoded in single standard encoding, such as the Latin alphabet.
The Latin alphabet offers the advantage of simplicity. There are only 26 letter characters, A to Z, provided one ignores case (upper or lower). There are no ligatures or diacritics. As n-grams have (symbols)n permutations, an encoding with a large number of symbols will result in a much higher number of dimensions for the data for even a small value of n.
