The Secret Lives of Names? Name Embeddings from Social Media
Table 7. 17 out of 20 most favorable last name with more than 5000 occurrences have Ashkenazi Jewish origin. Most popular Scandinavian last names get positive gains (in years). Both populations have longer lifespans than the average in U.S. Name embeddings are able to capture such fine-grained distinctions between groups.
['Jewish Name', 'Jewish Count', 'Jewish Gain', 'Scandinavian Name', 'Scandinavian Count', 'Scandinavian Gain']
Fine-grained Subgroups: This phenomenon is interesting because Jewish people have long lived in many countries so no single ethnicity or nationality feature could capture this group well. However in name embedding space, similar names have similar representations, because of communication homophily. The observation that these Jewish people had longer life expectancy agrees with the observation made by Institute for Jewish Policy Research(Abramson all get positive gains.