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Multilingual Database of Proper Nouns

We maintain the world's largest databases of CJK proper nouns, with over ten million entries, used by some of the world's major IT companies for a wide variety of applications such as named entity recognition (NER), machine translation (MT), information retrieval (IR) and input method editors. This edition, the Multilingual Database of Proper Nouns (CJKE-DPN), currently contains about 150,000 entries (including variants), covering the most common CJK and Western personal names and surnames, brings together five languages -- Simplified Chinese (SC), Traditional Chinese (TC), Japanese, Korean and English, in a multidirectional format, and has been expanded to include Arabic (see Table 2) and Spanish (not shown here).

The database includes various data fields (many of which are not shown in the sample), such as readings in pinyin, zhuyin fuhao (註音符號), hiragana and several romanization systems, semantic classification codes and frequency rankings, locale codes, and other useful information such as frequency statistics, only some of which are shown here.

Editorial Policy

It is important to note that the TC names are not merely a code-conversion equivalent of the SC names, but are accurate on both the orthographic and the lexemic levels (similar to American 'color' vs. British 'colour' as opposed to American 'gas' vs. British 'petrol'). For example, New Zealand in SC is 新西兰 Xīnxīlán but in TC it is 紐西蘭 Niǔxīlán (click here for details).

This database is constantly kept up-to-date, and includes such recent changes and additions to proper names as the late 2005 change of the Chinese for Seoul (서울) from 汉城 (hànchéng) to 首尔 (shǒuěr).

A unique feature of this database is that we distingsuish between SC and TC readings. Thus the pinyin for SC 期荣 is qīróng, but for the TC 期榮 it is qírōng. For details, see Taiwan and PRC Pinyin differences.

Data Fields

Field Name Field Description ID Unique identifying number ("N" prefix for "Name") TYPE Semantic classification code such "S" for surname, "G" for given name and "P" for place name. (More details) ENG Name in English JAP Name in Japanese SC Name in Simplified Chinese (hanzi) TC Name in Traditional Chinese (hanzi) KOR Name in Korean (hangul) LO Lexemic or Orthographic (see "Editorial Policy" above) YOMI Japanese reading in hiragana SC_PIN SC reading in pinyin plus tone with hyphen separating syllables TC_PIN TC reading in pinyin plus tone with hyphen separating syllables MOE Korean transcription in former Ministry of Education romanization ZHUYIN TC reading in zhuyin fuhao (註音符號) with tone (not shown here) LOCALE Country code for origin of name (not shown here)

CJKE Multilingual Database of Place Names

CJKA Multilingual Database of Place Names

CJKE Multilingual Database of Personal Names