Retrieval effectiveness of proper name search methods

Searching for names, e.g. author names or company names, is still an open problem. This paper reviews known similarity measures. These measures deal with phonetic similarity, typing errors and plain string similarity. It is shown experimentally that all three approaches lead to significantly higher retrieval quality than plain identity. Further improvements are possible by combining different methods; a probabilistic interpretation of string similarity is developed that leads to better results than an ad-hoc approach. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd