Patentee Name Harmonisation - ecoom.be

Implementation
Implementation is straightforward. All identified spelling variations in Table 19, Table 20 and
Table 21 are transferred to search and replace statements or rules as in the previous step –
legal form indication treatment.
All identified and validated occurrences of common company words were removed by executing
a program that reads the search and replace statements or rules, and executes an update query
on the data to replace the given keyword (spelling variation of common company word) with a
given string (replace with nothing to simply remove the common company word), while at the
same time updating a new field to contain the found spelling variation.
Result
Common company words have been removed at the end of names in 68,152 names, at the
beginning of names in 2,463 names, and anywhere in the name in 7,662 names.
Not all common words that are not distinctive elements in names are removed; only the most
commonly used ones are identified by using the last word index, first word index and full text
index. A more in-depth analysis of the indexes could reveal additional words safe to remove.
Impact
From 392,226 unique names to 385,771 unique names, an additional reduction of 6,455 names,
or a total reduction of 57,951 names (13.1%).
2.3 Spelling variation harmonization
Description
One of the causes of name variations is spelling variation (mistakes, typographical errors, etc.).
Identification of word similarities with approximate string searching (for example, based on
Levenshtein distance or edit distance) can be used to identify spelling variations. The problem is
that it is not possible to validate name variations in proper names.
For example, “AMTECH” and “IMTECH” have a Levenshtein distance of 1 but is it possible to
combine them into one organization name?
However, spelling, language and grammatical variations are identifiable in the case of plain
English words or other languages.
For example, “SYSTEM”, “SYSTEMS”, “SYSTEMEN”, “SYSTEMES” can all be harmonized to
“SYSTEM” or “SYSTEMS”.
Spelling variation harmonization can mutilate organization names and make them less
comprehensible. However, the idea is not to use these spelling-variation harmonized names as
final harmonized names but as some kind of technical search name that can be used to identify
name variations of the same organization.
Analysis
Spelling variations that can be harmonized were identified by using a full text index of the
organization names.
By sorting the index on the number of occurrences, most commonly used words can be
identified. Then, by sorting the index alphabetically, variations of those commonly used words
can be identified.
Table 22 contains spelling variations of words that can be harmonized.
Table 22: Spelling variations and their harmonized equivalent
KEYWORD NBR REMARKS
"SYSTEMEN" 48 "SYSTEM"
"SYSTEMES" 164 "SYSTEM"
"SYSTEME" 1,140 "SYSTEM"
"SYSTEMS" 10,104 "SYSTEM"
"INTERNATIONALE" 109 "INTERNATIONAL"
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