Ah, yes, it all sounds so familiar. I spent a lot of time on my previous job doing exactly the same type of work. We did not use the first name database, but we too had tables for suffixes, degrees, etc.

And I'm sure there are many others out there who've done the same thing.

>>Yes, indeed, the human eye does an awfully good job of that. Your solution is what we did as well.
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>>I was commenting (indirectly) on the statement of "a database of probable first and last names". I'm not sure how such a database would be of value.
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>In our algoritm we did use First Names database (it's not possible to have last name database). We also had a table for suffixes and words that can indicate the organization...
>
>It's quite an interesting application. As I said, in my former job I did couple of them with a somehow similar interface ideas: first the process attempts to do automatic cleanup, then the user cleans up ~2-15% of the bad cases...