Testing of Various Approaches for Semiautomatic Parish Records Word Standardization

Words clustering, Parish records, Levenshtein distance, Soundex, Double Metaphone

This paper deals with the clustering of words from parish records. Clustering is essential for downstream standardization. In the past, mostly in the 17th and beginning of 18th century, the names did not have a standard form, thus for further work, it is essential to create clusters of words that have the same meaning. Besides names, the parish records are in the various languages - Czech, German, Latin, so if we want to have relations between people, occupations, or causes of death in one language, we need to standardize it. The first step of standardization is pre-processing, then we compare words, and the last step is classification into clusters. The most crucial step here is a comparison of words. We have tested various approaches like Levenshtein distance and its modifications, Q-grams, Jaro-Winkler, and phonetic codings like Soundex and Double-Metaphone. All those methods have been with types of words that can appear in parish records first and last names, occupation, village, and relationship between people. From these tests, we have chosen the most suitable ways for the clustering of different types of words.