Ludwig van Beethoven

[richmond62]

Everyone's favourite "thunderbolted litso," to quote Anthony Burgess, had an awkward surname:

van Beethoven
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[Apologies in advance in case someone wants to delete all their postings because of a picture of "old Ludwig van". ]

Now I want to set up a "babyish" stack that will ask people for their full names:

so, bloody-minded composer types in "Ludwig van Beethoven" . . .

and the stack should extract the person's full family name . . .

now word and trueword won't manage that.

[dunbarx]

Richmond.

Sounds like fun, but I have no idea what you are asking.

Craig

[richmond62]

1. I am asking whether there is a way to pick up someone's surname from
a string when that surname consists of more than one word.

2. I am stirring the "sugar" with a picture of Ludwig van Beethoven.

[dunbarx]

. I am asking whether there is a way to pick up someone's surname from
a string when that surname consists of more than one word.

Ah.

How could LC know the difference between "van" and "Louis", as in "Robert Louis Stevenson". unless either:

1- You had a list of all possible surname "doubles", like "van", "von" or "de"

2- You were confident that in all such "doubles" the first word of such a double had a lower case initial char. Is it so that such compound "prefix" names are always lower case?

Craig

Edit:
I guess "Louis" is a middle name, not a part of a compound surname.

[SparkOut]

This would be a nightmare to try to create rules for what could be parts of given names and family names if the goal is a generally reliable parser. Spanish names for instance where there are frequently double-barrelled forenames as well as family names.
What about cultures where the family name is typically the first written and the given name follows?
Why not pass that responsibility to the person making the input, and have multiple fields with appropriate labels?

[dunbarx]

Richmond.

Sparkout makes a point. If you had, say, two fields for a persons name, wouldn't the user have to put "de Sade" into the last-name field? Right there is your parsing tool; if there are two words in that last field, you are golden.

Craig

[richmond62]

I would always favour asking end-users for their given name and their family names in separate text fields
or with separate questions.

I merely posted this because I had an odd thought in the middle of the night (mainly about how computerised systems would
NEVER manage to completely mimic humans), and thought it would stimulate debate, which it has.

[SparkOut]

I think the task as stated might be readily achieved by (say) Google using AI, given the resources available. There might even be an API these days, or forthcoming.
As a project for a sole programmer to create an algorithm in a standalone application, this would be where I see the difficulty. A matter of scale, really.
Siri and Alexa, etc can be examples of the progress made in parsing speech, compared to dictation software of the 1990s for instance. They aren't perfect yet, but with the power of those parents, they are getting closer.
There are other problems that still cannot be solved with a human-free approach (language translation, for instance) but that is improving, even so. Is a perfectly idiomatic natural translation possible by computer AI only? Not quite so sure, but I can believe that it is possible for AI to parse family/given names from a single input as reliably as Joe Human - but that takes/has taken more programming/computing/sample analysis than I care to contemplate trying to achieve in LiveCode.

[SparkOut]

I am always amused by "old" sci-fi representation of expected computer power in "the future". Invariably the computer would have a "personality" and interact with the human operator/spaceship crew by speech, in a much more sophisticated manner than Siri. Yet the command would be something banal by today's standards, and take hours or more, to calculate such trivialities as the 300th decimal place of pi, or the thousandth prime number. [citation needed... not real memories, but you get the idea].

[jacque]

Those old movies did inspire today's computer behavior though. When flip phones first arrived everyone wanted one because they looked like Star Trek communicators. And Google Assistant is getting closer and closer to the projected movie ideal. It now supports continued conversation so you don't need to use the trigger word before each question and it's responses are increasingly human. And I use Google Lens almost daily to identify all kinds of things. I wouldn't say it has a personality yet but it sure does understand what is asked of it. Siri doesn't even come close.

I told my assistant to call me Boss. I like when it responds to my bedtime routine and then says "Goodnight Boss."

[stam]

I told my assistant to call me Boss. I like when it responds to my bedtime routine and then says "Goodnight Boss."

[FourthWorld]

[richmond62]

Not that far off at all!
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