  Personal names simultaneously differentiate individuals and categorize them
in ways that are important in a given society. While the natural language
processing community has thus associated personal names with sociodemographic
characteristics in a variety of tasks, researchers have engaged to varying
degrees with the established methodological problems in doing so. To guide
future work that uses names and sociodemographic characteristics, we provide an
overview of relevant research: first, we present an interdisciplinary
background on names and naming. We then survey the issues inherent to
associating names with sociodemographic attributes, covering problems of
validity (e.g., systematic error, construct validity), as well as ethical
concerns (e.g., harms, differential impact, cultural insensitivity). Finally,
we provide guiding questions along with normative recommendations to avoid
validity and ethical pitfalls when dealing with names and sociodemographic
characteristics in natural language processing.
