1.1.1.6. Sounds-alike Search

Note

Part of the Draft v4 User Guide: under review during beta testing.

Historical place names reach us spelled in many ways and written in many scripts. München, Munich and Мюнхен are one name, heard three ways. A search that only compares letters misses these connections. WHG also compares how names sound.

1.1.1.6.1. What it does

When you search, or when Map your Data looks for matches, WHG considers names that sound alike even when they are spelled differently or written in a different script. Results are ranked by how close the sounds are, rather than simply matched or not matched.

It helps most with:

• historical and variant spellings of the same name;

• transliterations of one name into different alphabets;

• cross-script matches, for example Latin and Cyrillic, Greek or Arabic forms.

It does not treat different names for one place as sound-alikes: Deutschland, Germany and Allemagne are different names, and they are connected through the records’ other evidence (location, type, source links), not through sound.

1.1.1.6.2. How it works, in brief

Each distinct name is converted into a description of how it is pronounced. Language-specific rules turn written letters into sounds, and a model trained on place names from many languages turns those sounds into a numerical “fingerprint”. Names whose fingerprints are close sound alike. The same method runs on WHG’s servers and inside Map your Data in your browser, so both give the same answers.

For the technical design, see Toponym Phonetics.

1.1.1.6.3. Its limits

Sounds-alike search is a discovery aid, not a verdict. It can:

• miss a variant that looks unlike anything it has learned from;

• work less well for scripts and languages that are poorly represented in its training data;

• rest on sound rules that are imperfect for some languages.

Always check a suggested match against the record’s other evidence.

1.1.1.6.4. Help improve it

The letter-to-sound rules for each language can be wrong, incomplete, or missing letters the language uses. WHG provides a page where people who know a language can check its rules against real place names from the index, say what is wrong, and propose a correction. Reading it is open to everyone. Contributing needs an account, and contributions are dedicated to the public domain (CC0), so they can be used by anyone, including the open-source project the rules come from.