Malaysian Name-based Ethnicity Classification using LSTM

초록

Name separation (splitting full names into surnames and given names) is not a tedious task in a multiethnic country because the procedure for splitting surnames and given names is ethnicity-specific. Malaysia has multiple main ethnic groups; therefore, separating Malaysian full names into surnames and given names proves a challenge. In this study, we develop a two-phase framework for Malaysian name separation using deep learning. In the initial phase, we predict the ethnicity of full names. We propose a recurrent neural network with long short-term memory network-based model with character embeddings for prediction. Based on the predicted ethnicity, we use a rule-based algorithm for splitting full names into surnames and given names in the second phase. We evaluate the performance of the proposed model against various machine learning models and demonstrate that it outperforms them by an average of 9%. Moreover, transfer learning and fine-tuning of the proposed model with an additional dataset results in an improvement of up to 7% on average.

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