Nomgen

Nomgen, short for nominal generator, is a computational tool or framework designed to produce names and related nominal phrases for characters, places, organizations, or products within fictional or simulated contexts. It is used in game development, worldbuilding, and automated data generation to create varied, believable onomastic material without manual authoring.

Etymology and scope: The term nomgen reflects the goal of generating nominal forms rather than prose or descriptive text. In practice, nomgen systems may be specialized for cultural or linguistic plausibility, allowing outputs to reflect particular language families, time periods, or geographic regions. They are often integrated into larger pipelines for storytelling, localization testing, or automated content creation.

Methodologies: Nomgen approaches range from rule-based to statistical and neural. Rule-based systems encode syllable templates, phonotactic constraints, and curated lexica to ensure pronounceability and stylistic coherence. Statistical methods use probabilistic models or name corpora to capture realistic naming patterns. Neural nomgens leverage sequence models, such as transformers, trained on large name datasets to generate novel names that resemble a target aesthetic while permitting conditioning on attributes like gender, culture, or era.

Applications and challenges: Common uses include generating character and place names for video games and novels, creating test data for software that handles personal names, and assisting writers with worldbuilding. Challenges include avoiding cultural insensitivity or duplicates, handling transliteration, controlling output quality, and addressing potential biases in training data.

See also: name generator, procedural generation, linguistic onomastics.