"Arroz" by Any Other Name: Unicode and Named Entities
Richard Gillam - Language Analysis Systems, Inc.
Intended Audience: Software Engineers, Managers, Systems Analysts
Session Level: Beginner, Intermediate
As with so many other language-related tasks, there's great complexity in dealing with named entities (names of people, organizations, places, etc.) that many software developers aren't aware of. And Unicode is no more a complete solution for handling named entities than it is a complete solution for software internationalization or any other language-related area of computing. In fact, in many ways, using Unicode with named entities can open the door to 'greater' complexity. This talk will be a in-depth introduction to the business of handling named entities in software, and to the ways in which Unicode both simplifies and complicates the process. We'll look at the diversity and structure of names, the operations that software often has to perform on names, how the variability of names as they cross languages and writing systems can make these operations complicated and difficult, and some of the possible ways of dealing with these complications.