| --- |
| 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 | |
|
|
| ```json |
| {"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](SOURCES.md). |
|
|
