Clustering of Spell Variations for Proper Nouns Transliterated from the other languages

Abstract: One of the prominent problems with processing and operating on text data is the non uniformity of it. Due to the change in the dialects and languages, the caliber of translation is low. This creates a unique problem while using NLP in text data; which is the spell variation arising from the inconsistent translations and transliterations. This problem can also be further aggravated by the human error arising from the various ways to write a Proper Noun from an Indian language into its English equivalent. Translating proper nouns originating from Indian languages can be complicated as some proper nouns are also used as common nouns which might be taken literally. Applications of NLP that require addresses, names and other proper nouns face this problem frequently. We propose a method to cluster these spell variations for proper nouns using ML techniques and mathematical similarity equations. We aimed to use Affinity Propagation to determine relative similarity between the tokens. The results are augmented by filtering the token-variation pair by a similarity threshold. We were able to reduce the spell variations by a considerable amount. This application can significantly reduce the amount of human annotation efforts needed for data cleansing and formatting.