Balancing Speed and Accuracy in Neural-Enhanced Phonetic Name Matching

Automatic co-text free name matching has a variety of important real-world applications, ranging from fiscal compliance to border control. Name matching systems use a variety of engines to compare two names for similarity, with one of the most critical being phonetic name similarity. In this work, we re-frame existing work on neural sequence-to-sequence transliteration such that it can be applied to name matching. Subsequently, for performance reasons, we then build upon this work to utilize an alternative, non-recurrent neural encoder module. This ultimately yields a model which is 63% faster while still maintaining a 16% improvement in averaged precision over our baseline model.