A proposal for a multilevel linguistic representation of Spanish personal names

Abstract

This paper proposes a multilevel representation of personal names, which makes a clear distinction between ontological information, described in a person database, and different levels of linguistic representation of personal names. Adopting the linguistic model and formalisms provided within the Meaning ⇔ Text framework, it is argued that, contrary to other proper names (e.g. names of organizations, toponyms, etc.), which should be treated similarly to idioms, personal name strings such as Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero should not be represented as single units in any linguistic level, nor in the lexicon. Variant forms referring to a concrete person (e.g. Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, Rodriguez Zapatero, Zapatero, ZP ) are accounted for by a set of rules connecting the person database and the semantic level representation of the personal name.