Posted by By the end of the week, NamSor v1 will have processed over four billion names since we launched our API for Gender Studies and Migration Research in 2014. It’s time for a brand new version: NamSor v2 will be launched in January 2019.
Why the API change?
For several years, we’ve maintained a free Gender API, so anyone can conduct an analysis of the gender gap where it matters (in a company, in an industry sector, in a conference …)
In a recent independant survey, we came first in accuracy to determine the gender of European names and African names, but we lost points on Asian names. So we needed to work on a new version with an enhanced A.I. framework to regain our leadership.
From ‘free’ to ‘freemium’
Our free API (no registration required) was used by many researchers to gender-code small to medium-size databases and conduct innovative gender studies. We also had a good share of the top 100 global Universities subscribe to our commercial API, to conduct large scale gender studies (in fields as diverse as: Science, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, Investment, Marketing, Anthropology, Migration …)
We found it challenging to support our free API users, when we don’t have any means of contacting them, so we decided to change from a free to a freemium model. We believe our gender API is instrumental to a Gender Data Revolution, so we want to keep the API sign-up as easy as possible. It will remain FREE to process up to 5000 names per month.
Past year achievements
Looking back at 2018, several newly published scientific and working papers cited NamSor :
- Selective matching: gender gap and network formation in research (http://crest.science/RePEc/wpstorage/2018-07.pdf)
- The Gender Gap in Computer Science—A Bibliometric Analysis (https://opus4.kobv.de/opus4-fau/frontdoor/deliver/index/docId/9437/file/CS-2018-2.pdf)
- Comparison and benchmark of name-to-gender inference services (https://peerj.com/articles/cs-156/)
- Modelling the Effects of Open Access, Gender and Collaboration on Citation Outcomes: Replicating, Expanding and Drilling (https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/handle/1887/65337)
- Recursion identify algorithm for Gender Prediction with Chinese names (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Recursion-identify-algorithm-for-Gender-Prediction-Zhao-Kamareddine/d7a38ff4e0e383a0b98ad0787849cebf941ba398)
- The Impact of Gender on Conference Authorship in Audio Engineering: Analysis Using a New Data Collection Method (http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/128399/)
- Sentiment Score Analysis for Opinion Mining (https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-981-13-0923-6_32)
- Mining implicit data association from Tripadvisor hotel (http://ceur-ws.org/Vol-2083/paper-09.pdf)
- Name Similarity Encourages Generosity: A Field Experiment in Email Personalization (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3244125)
- Interaction Ritual Threads: Does IRC Theory Apply Online? (https://nyuscholars.nyu.edu/en/publications/interaction-ritual-threads-does-irc-theory-apply-online)
- The Startup Europe Ecosystem (https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/154760230.pdf)
- Twitter Opinion Mining and Boosting Using Sentiment Analysis (https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8452838/)
- You name it?! Everyday discrimination through accustomed perception of personal names (https://edoc.hu-berlin.de/handle/18452/20029)
- Discovery and Analysis of Social Media Data: How businesses can create customized filters to more effectively use public data (http://www.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1214607)
Also, with Gender Gap Grader, we’ve made our own data viz about the Gender Gap among tech keynote speakers, with a comparison between VivaTech and other major tech conferences (CES, Web Summit). That was fun ! We interviewed Babou Olengha-Aaby (Founder & CEO at The Next Billion) for comments.
About NamSor
NamSor™ Applied Onomastics is a European vendor of sociolinguistics software (NamSor sorts names). NamSor mission is to help understand international flows of money, ideas and people. We proudly support Gender Gap Grader.
Reach us at: contact@namsor.com
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