How Nonimo finds names without a list of names

Most detection tools answer the question “is this word a name?” by looking the word up in a list. That approach has a problem that no bigger list fixes: the people most likely to be missed are the people least represented in the list. A tool trained mostly on common Anglo surnames catches Smith every time and misses names it has rarely seen.

Nonimo asks a different question: is this position in the text a position where a name goes?

The label does the work, not the name

Look at any real form. The name never floats free. It sits under a label that the form wrote, not the person:

Applicant: Amelia Torres
Next of kin: Daniel Okonkwo
Father's name: Abdirahman Warsame

The engine recognises the label, and masks whatever value sits in that slot. It never needs to know whether the value “looks like a name”, so an unusual surname is caught exactly like a common one. The same logic covers signatures at the foot of a document, titles before a surname, the display name in an email address, and the columns of a table whose header is a name label.

What happens after the first mention

A real document declares the name once, in its field, and then repeats it through the prose. Nonimo propagates the first confirmed find to every repetition. And within a conversation, a name seen once is remembered: if you ask a follow-up question five minutes later with the name written bare, it is still masked, with the same label, so the AI can follow who is who.

Numbers are treated differently, on purpose

Identifiers with check digits, like tax file numbers, Medicare numbers or an IBAN, can be verified arithmetically. Those are cleaned automatically and silently, because the maths leaves no doubt.

Names have no check digit. So everything found by position is masked visibly: you see what was masked, the reason in one sentence, and one click undoes it. If the engine masks a word it should not have, that costs you a click. If it let a name through, that could not be undone. The two mistakes do not cost the same, and the design takes the cheap one.

Try it

The live demo on the home page runs the real engine inside your browser tab. Paste a document, or load an example, and watch the network tab of your browser while you do it: the page makes no requests. That is not a marketing claim, it is how the engine is built.