Identifying a person's name vs. a dictionary word

Question

Is there some way to recognize that a word is likely to be/is not likely to be a person\'s name?

So if I see the word \"understanding\" I would get a probability of 0.01

Answer 1

A related task in natural language processing is known as Named Entity Recognition and deals with names of people, organizations, locations, etc.

Most models designed to solve this problem are statistical in nature and use both context and prior knowledge in their predictions. There is a number of open source implementations one can use, e.g. the Stanford NER, see the online demo.