In my experience doing stuff like this for artist/song record linkage, the key is really to take a "query expansion" approach rather than a "normalization" appr

In my experience doing stuff like this for artist/song record linkage, the key is really to take a "query expansion" approach rather than a "normalization" approach, because choosing a single normalized form is impossible. So it's better to embrace that there are dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of interpretations and choose probabilistically. A great example is trying to deal with the "sort name" of artists: e.g. "Presley, Elvis". It's easy to assume that "Hazlewood, Lee & Nancy Sinatra" means "Lee Hazlewood & Nancy Sinatra". How bout "Sinatra, Frank & Nancy"? Now the rules are different: the expansion could either be "Frank Sinatra & Nancy Sinatra" (correct) or "Frank Sinatra & Nancy" (but there's no singer who just goes by "Nancy", or is there?) Now how about "Peter, Paul & Mary"? In that case it's already the literal expanded form referencing three people, not two people named "Paul Peter & Mary Peter" or "Paul Peter & Mary". So, you just assume they are all possible and rank them based on real-world data. You're right, not always easy! (Treating them as an unordered bag of tokens can either help or hurt accuracy – that has its own problems when you consider how short and similar many titles are, and how some artists deliberately name themselves as jokes/riffs on a more famous one. Not to mention that after all this it could still be ambigous: MusicBrainz knows about six artists all named "Nirvana". So context is key!)