The Nickname Dictionary

The nickname dictionary is a static lookup table applied at L1 during name decomposition. It maps common short names and nicknames to their formal equivalents, populating the canonical_first field while preserving the original first field unchanged.

Scope

The prototype dictionary contains approximately 100 mappings covering the most frequent English-language nicknames encountered in US election data:

The target for production is 500+ mappings, expanding to cover Spanish-language nicknames (Pepe→José, Pancho→Francisco), regional variants, and less common English forms. The full reference list is maintained in Appendix: Full Nickname Dictionary.

Both forms are preserved

When the dictionary maps Charlie → Charles, the L1 record stores both:

{
  "first": "Charlie",
  "canonical_first": "Charles"
}

The original first is never overwritten. The composite string sent to L2 embedding uses canonical_first, which is why the embedding for “Charles Crist” and “CRIST, CHARLES JOSEPH” can be compared at all — even though the raw cosine similarity between “Charlie Crist” and “CRIST, CHARLES JOSEPH” is only 0.451.

The Ted problem

Some nicknames are ambiguous. “Ted” can map to Edward (Ted Kennedy) or Theodore (Ted Cruz). “Bill” is unambiguous — it always maps to William. “Ted” is not.

The current dictionary maps Ted → Edward, which is the more common historical usage in US politics. This is wrong for Theodore-named candidates. The correct resolution requires context that L1 does not have: party, state, office, or a reference database of known candidates.

The planned fix is a two-pass approach: L1 applies the majority mapping (Ted → Edward), and L3 entity resolution can override it when the LLM has enough context to determine the correct expansion. The canonical_first field is treated as a best guess at L1, not a final answer.

Other ambiguous nicknames with the same property: Pat (Patricia or Patrick), Chris (Christopher or Christine), Alex (Alexander or Alexandra), Sam (Samuel or Samantha). For these, L1 does not apply a mapping — canonical_first is left equal to first — and disambiguation is deferred to L3.