2025-09-12 –, Ballroom 1
Free form data entry is a realm that is simply begging for data that you’ll never be able to crossmatch. Whether it’s typos, using obscure initialisations, or deciding that “name” sometimes means “full name” and sometimes means “nickname of the day” your data is never going to be a perfect match. And let me tell you, those problems are multiplied if some of that data is entered by children!
I’ll take you through the techniques from edit distance to generative AI (and combinations thereof) I have used to match up proper nouns ranging from people’s names to schools and see how some techniques work for people and not for places, and vice versa. I’ll show you how it is working in practice to help track event participants over the course of a single workshop day and ultimately over the course of their journey through our community.
I have a problem. I have masses of free-form textual data that captures the participation of members of a community in our events over many, many years! This data includes things like student names, school names, and other proper nouns – things that might have many interpretations of a “correct” answer or “good enough” answer, and things that kids and their parents certainly have different thoughts on.
I needed to get to the bottom of fuzzy matching of proper nouns and to work out what combinations of different algorithmic and AI techniques worked best for different types of nouns. So come with me on this journey of typos, nicknames, and how this non-Sydney-schooled Pythonista was able to figure out which schools “Spats”, “Tech”, and “Cathedral” actually were.
Renee Noble spends her time bringing together tech, teaching, and community in as many ways as possible.
As a Cloud Developer Advocate on the Python Advocacy team at Microsoft, she spends her time teaching the community through global events, creating Python learning resources, and local workshops for students and professionals. Renee is also the CEO and Co-Founder or Tech Inclusion, best known for Girls’ Programming Network workshops that run around Australia. On top of this, Renee started her own Business, ConnectEd Code, bringing tech education opportunities to schools
Well known for her work in tech education and the advancement of women, Renee was most recently awarded as Champion of Change 2025 by Women Leading Tech.