Database of Arab Names
D A N

قاعدة بيانات الأسماء العربيّة

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©2004-2008 The CJK Dictionary Institute, Inc.

1. Overview

DAN is based on authoritative resources and has undergone extensive proofreading and expansion based on about 15 million names derived from a large variety of sources, including websites, corpora, books, dictionaries, and encyclopedias.

As an example of our ongoing expansion work, we have recently added numerous variants of the 99 names of Allah, which now total tens of thousands. For example, Al-Rahim "The Most Merciful One," which is combined with Abd as in Abd-al-Rahiim (عبدالرحيم), has many variants like Abdelraheem, Abd ar-Raheem, Abdul Rahim, Abd al Raheem, Abderrahim (click here for a partial list). In addition, as shown in the table of variants for محمود Mahmoud below, we have greatly expanded the number of romanized spelling variants. For example, the Arabic long vowel و /uu/ can be spelled in various ways, while the consonant د /d/ can sometimes be spelled as t rather than the normal d.

Variants of محمود

No	Variant	Web frequency
1	Mahmoud	13600000
2	Mahmud	04160000
3	Mahmut	02390000
4	Mahmood	02330000
5	Mehmood	00444000

2. Practical Applications

Processing and normalizing names and their numerous variants useful in a variety of real world applications, such as:

1. Information Retrieval (IR), such as query processing by search engines.
2. Named Entity Recognition (NER) and information extraction.
3. Machine Translation (MT), as for transcribing unknown proper nouns.
4. Anti-money laundering (AML) and fraud detection by financial institutions.
5. Security applications such as criminal watch lists and retail fraud..
6. Cyber security applications such as for preventing identity theft.
7. Law enforcement applications including most-wanted lists and deportation lists.

Since DAN includes a large number of spelling variants (some names have thousands variants), it is of special interest to security agencies and security applications such as anti-money laundering, making it easy to find names of criminals spelled in a multitude of ways (e.g., Usama bin Ladin, Osama ben Laden, Osama bin Laden, etc.). To achieve this goal more effectively, we have expanded the database to cover the Arabic names listed in the OFAC (Office of Foreign Assets Control) list, along with their orthographic variants that goes well beyond the OFAC list. This is a list of individuals and organizations that pose a threat to foreign policy and/or national security of the US that plays a major role in financial institutions and security agencies throughout the world.

3. Data Sample

The sample below shows small excerpts of some popular names found in DAN. The fields shown here contain the following data:

1. PRIMARY ID: unique number to identify the Arabic headword
2. SUB_ID: number identifying the variant(s) of the headword
3. ARABIC: The Arabic headword in Arabic script
4. TYPE: name classification code (M=Male, F=Female, S=Surname, P=Place
5. TRANSLITERATION: The Arabic headword in Buckwalter transliteration. For details, see our website for ARAN (Automatic Romanizer of Arabic Names).
6. ENGLISH: one of multiple (often thousands) of English transcriptions (variants)
7. JAPANESE: one of possibly multiple Japanese transcriptions (for reference).