README.md

metadata

dataset_info:
  features:
    - name: id
      dtype: int64
    - name: domain
      dtype: string
    - name: messages
      list:
        - name: role
          dtype: string
        - name: content
          dtype: string
    - name: name
      dtype: string
    - name: sex
      dtype: string
    - name: decade
      dtype: int64
    - name: country
      dtype: string
    - name: country_label
      dtype: string
    - name: region
      dtype: string
    - name: language
      dtype: 'null'
    - name: historical
      dtype: bool
    - name: archetype
      dtype: string
    - name: kind
      dtype: string
    - name: flavor
      dtype: string
    - name: setting
      dtype: string
    - name: role
      dtype: string
    - name: tone
      dtype: string
    - name: culture
      dtype: string
  splits:
    - name: train
      num_bytes: 3137542
      num_examples: 13217
    - name: validation
      num_bytes: 167677
      num_examples: 708
  download_size: 1007355
  dataset_size: 3305219
configs:
  - config_name: default
    data_files:
      - split: train
        path: data/train-*
      - split: validation
        path: data/validation-*
language:
  - en
license: cc-by-sa-4.0
size_categories:
  - 10K<n<100K
task_categories:
  - text-generation
pretty_name: Name Generator
tags:
  - names
  - character-names
  - fantasy-names
  - creative-writing
  - synthetic
  - sft

Name Generator

Short requests for a character name, each answered with a name and nothing else: real-world names for real-world requests ("a Brazilian man's name" → Paulo Rozeno Freitas) and invented names for fantasy requests ("a grim name for a dwarven blacksmith"). Made for fine-tuning small models out of the few names language models keep reaching for (Elara Voss, Kael Thorne, Dr. Sarah Chen).

split	rows	real	fantasy
train	13,217	8,536	4,681
validation	708	459	249

{"domain": "real", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "What is a Spanish-inspired male name with a Spanish-sounding surname?"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "David Úbeda"}]}
{"domain": "fantasy", "messages": [{"role": "user", "content": "A harsh but evocative name for a grizzled hill dwarf smith in my grim mountain kingdom"}, {"role": "assistant", "content": "Korgell Gellbau"}]}

The v1 tag holds the earlier real-names-only release.

How it was made

Real names

1. Names. Full names were sampled with namebank from public name data: national statistics offices (US SSA and Census, INSEE, ONS, INE, IBGE, PESEL, SSB, SCB and others), Wikidata people grouped by citizenship and birth decade, and Faker/Mimesis locale lists. Names follow real frequency distributions by country, sex and birth decade; first names and surnames are paired the way they co-occur; local conventions apply (name order, double surnames, gendered surnames, patronymics). Coverage: 333 countries and historical states; 2,129 rows (24%) from historical states. Most frequent: China (330), India (329), United States (166), Indonesia (147), Pakistan (137), Nigeria (134), Brazil (128), Bangladesh (128).
2. Requests. Each name, with its sex, birth decade and country, went to Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512 (Q8_0 GGUF), which wrote a request that the name answers.

Fantasy names

1. Names. namebank fantasy invents them. Species (elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons, fae...) get invented naming languages, each culture with its own sounds, syllable shapes and morphemes drawn from a palette for its species; species never draw on real languages. Human cultures are modeled on real naming traditions (Anglo-Saxon, Arabic, Caucasian, Celtic, Chinese, East African, Finnic, Frankish, Germanic, Hellenic, Japanese, Latin, Magyar, Norse, Persian, Polynesian, Slavic, South Asian, Turkic, West African) through culture-wide sound changes and a character model trained on the changed names. Halflings get compound family names from homely words. A tone (grim, gentle, whimsical, noble...) tilts each name's sounds toward it.
2. Guarantees. No given name or family name is a real name in namebank's data (every name from the sources above), none is on a list of names language models overuse or a list of famous fictional names, or within about one edit of either, and none contains an obscenity.
3. Requests. The same model wrote a request from each name's kind (elf, dwarf, human...), role, tone and, for human cultures, the tradition it borrows from; a random share of details was left out of each prompt. Requests for human characters always signal a fantasy setting, so they don't read as real-name requests. By archetype: human-inspired (1,184), human (756), dwarf (447), elf (420), orc (296), fae (218), vampire (205), goblin (199), gnome (197), demon (196), halfling (186), dragon (175), giant (118), merfolk (110), lizardfolk (96), dark elf (70), eldritch (57).

Cleanup

Requests that contained the answer, named another character, ran over several lines or (for fantasy humans) gave no fantasy cue were dropped (2,075 rows).

Fields

• messages: the request (user) and the answer (assistant, the name alone), ready for chat SFT.
• domain: real or fantasy. name: the answer again. sex: M, F or X (unisex, or sex doesn't apply).
• Real names: decade (birth decade), country (ISO code, or a Wikidata QID for historical states), country_label, region (UN subregion), language, historical.
• Fantasy names: archetype (elf, dwarf, human-inspired...), kind (what the request writer was told), flavor (the real tradition a human culture borrows from), setting, role, tone, culture (names sharing it come from one invented culture).

Splits

validation holds about 5% of the rows, picked by a hash of the answer, so no name appears in both splits.

Use

Supervised fine-tuning of a name generator. Compute the loss on the assistant turn only: the answer is a handful of tokens, and the requests were written by a small model.

Limitations

• Wikidata covers notable people, who skew older, male and elite. Countries without official name statistics inherit that skew.
• Requests come from a 3B model: phrasing repeats, and some are vaguer than the facts behind them.
• A real full name here is a sampled combination of real first names and surnames, not a record of a real person; any match with a real person is coincidental.
• Fantasy names are generated, not curated: some are clumsy, and cultures modeled on real traditions reflect the generator's sound changes rather than those languages.
• Spelling and romanization follow each source.

License

CC BY-SA 4.0, because some of the name lists namebank draws on are share-alike (IBGE's 2010 census via brasil.io, Wiktionary, JMnedict). Per-source licenses, URLs and retrieval dates are in SOURCES.md.