What’s in a name? Hopefully, valuable contact data for your business. But some names clearly contain red flags for bad data – and that’s where we come in.
Name Validation is a very effective tool for weeding out garbage, bogus and unreliable names. This service can be used in real-time while creating leads, or used to process a large list of names at once. It is great tool for cutting down on the amount of unreliable data that can be entered into a system.
This article will walk you through the different scores that the DOTS Name Validation 2 service provides, to help you get the most out of this tool. In addition to a massive list of names that we compare input names against, we also do several other checks. These scores can help identify why a particular name was considered to be invalid, as well as helping to shed some light as to what types of validation Name Validation performs.
Overall scores
One of the first things users will want to look at is the OverallNameScore value. This score represents the service overall rating for the given name. This score value ranges from 0 to 5, with 0 indicating a definitely bad name and 5 indicating a definitely good name. This is usually the first result someone might look at when determining the validity of a name.
We generate this overall score based on several other checks, validations and scores that the service can generate. However this might not be the last stop a user would make when attempting to determine if a name is valid or not. Based on your use case, you may want to look at one of the other score values our service provides, described below.
Other scores provided
The other score values that the service gives also range from 0 to 5. These values indicate the likelihood that the particular scoring category applies to that name. For example if a name received a VulgarityScore of 5, then that name would definitely have some type of vulgar word present. Below are the different scoring categories that the service provides.
VulgarityScore
As mentioned above, this score indicates the likelihood that a vulgar word is present in the input name. This score highly affects the overall score, as this is a key item used to sniff out bad or unprofessional name information.
CelebrityScore
This rating represents the likelihood that the input name provided is a known celebrity. This field will also work with fictional celebrities, so names like “Micky Mouse” and “Homer Simpson” will receive high Celebrity scores, as well as real life celebrities like “Tom Cruise” or “Madonna”.
BogusScore
The BogusScore field will let the user know if a given name is simply just a word or phrase that wouldn’t make sense. For example, single words or phrases that aren’t names (such as “Sandwich” or “The Quick Brown Fox”) will receive a high bogus score.
GarbageScore
Random key strokes or inputs that are not valid words will receive a high Garbage score. This would correspond to input like “asdfg” or any other series of random letters, keystrokes and input that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense as a name.
DictionaryScores
Finally, we provide scores that indicate the likelihood that the input text is a dictionary word. These tend to have less weight on the overall score, as there are quite a few legitimate dictionary terms that can be considered last names. For example, the name “Park” is a relatively common last name, so it will receive a lower dictionary score of 1, while a word like “Fluorescent” would receive a high dictionary score because it is less common.
As with any of our services, there can always be specific use cases that may require some more information about how our services work. Service Objects has a team of customer focused people standing by to help you get the validated data you need. If you have any questions about our services, don’t hesitate to reach out to us – we would love to help you get the validated data you need!
