Discovery Challenge: Recommending Given Names

All over the world, future parents are facing the task of finding a suitable given name for their children. This choice is influenced by different factors, such as the social context, language, cultural background and especially personal taste. Although this task is omnipresent, little research has been conducted on the analysis and application of interrelations among given names from a data mining perspective.

We are pleased to organize this year’s ECML PKDD Discovery Challenge, tackling the task of recommending given names. The challenge comprises two phases: First, there will be an offline competition, where participants predict future search activities based on a training data set which is derived from the name search website nameling. Then, there will be also an online competition, where participants integrate their recommender systems into the nameling website.

We are very much looking forward to this challenge and we expect many different contributions as we believe that the interplay of different influencing factors on the preference and choice of given names, links different disciplines and data mining approaches. The influence of personal taste, language and geographic user location, for example, presents an opportunity for context aware recommendations, and the impact of the social context of a user brings in the social network analysis community. Further, the etymological roots as well as connotations of names that have arisen over time (e.g., through popular cultural, political or religious bearers of a given name) suggest, that methods based on inherent semantics and “content” may also yield successful recommendation approaches. Eventually, methods from the field of sentiment analysis may help to distinguish names which are popular because users like those names from those, which are popular because users are interested in its context information.

Your DC13 Team

Stephan Doerfel Andreas Hotho Robert Jäschke Folke Mitzlaff Jürgen Müller

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