  We introduce ParaNames, a massively multilingual parallel name resource
consisting of 140 million names spanning over 400 languages. Names are provided
for 16.8 million entities, and each entity is mapped from a complex type
hierarchy to a standard type (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we
create the largest resource of this type to date. We describe our approach to
filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible.
ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining
tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks
such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate the usefulness of
ParaNames on two tasks. First, we perform canonical name translation between
English and 17 other languages. Second, we use it as a gazetteer for
multilingual named entity recognition, obtaining performance improvements on
all 10 languages evaluated.
