Classifying Arab names geographically

Different names may be popular in different countries. Hence, person names may give a clue to a person's country of origin. Along with other features, mapping names to countries can be helpful in a variety of applications such as country tagging twitter users. This paper describes the collection of Arabic Twitter user names that are either written in Arabic or transliterated into Latin characters along with their stated geographical locations. To classify previously unseen names, we trained naive Bayes and Support Vector Machine (SVM) multi-class classifiers using primarily bag-of-words features. We are able to map Arabic user names to specific Arab countries with 79% accuracy and to specific regions (Gulf, Egypt, Levant, Maghreb, and others) with 94% accuracy. As for transliterated Arabic names, the accuracy per country and per region was 67% and 83% respectively. The approach is generic and language independent, and can be used to collect and classify names to other countries or regions, and considering language-dependent name features (like the compound names, and person titles) yields to better results.