Yeah completely non-standard names (like nicknames, abbreviations, acronyms) are a real pain to deal with, and string matching just completely fails on them. We

Yeah completely non-standard names (like nicknames, abbreviations, acronyms) are a real pain to deal with, and string matching just completely fails on them. We (seatgeek) handle it the low tech way -- a giant list of name aliases that we run through during pre-processing. Not exactly worthy of a blog post, but it does the job well enough.