ビヨンセのアルバム”レモネード”がリリースされた夜、噂のファッションデザイナー レイチェルロイが
アップした写真とコメントを巡って、ビヨンセのファンがレイチェルロイのSNSを攻撃しました。
怒ったファンは、間違えて有名シェフ レイチェルレイのSNSアカウントにも群がりました。
確かに２人の名前はとてもよく似ています。Rosette の名前照合機能で比較すると 83.6% の一致です。

—————————————–

The drama
True to form, Beyoncé once again “broke the internet” Saturday night with the surprise drop of her sixth
solo album and accompanying visual album of the same name, Lemonade. Typically a very private celebrity,
Beyoncé shocked fans with the album’s themes of infidelity and marital strife. The seemingly personal
content of the album has had fans–self named, the “Beyhive”–buzzing ever since with speculation on the
health of the starlet’s marriage to rapper Jay-Z, and the identity of the other woman: “Becky with the
good hair.”

Initially premiering on HBO Saturday night, Lemonade is exclusively available via TIDAL, Jay-Z’s music
streaming service. Despite TIDAL editor Ryan Pinkard calling the album “a conceptual project based on
every woman’s journey of self knowledge and healing,” the internet hordes are convinced Beyoncé’s lyrics
are a window into a dark period in the power couple’s marriage, and immediately set out to identity the
woman responsible. Social media chaos ensued.

When fashion designer Rachel Roy posted the picture below with the caption “Good hair don’t care” shortly
after the album dropped, the Beyhive considered it an admission to being “Becky with the good hair,” and
crucified her on social media with posts, comments on her pictures, and even attacks on her family’s social
media accounts. (Roy has since issued a public statement denying any involvement and taken down the picture.)

Unfortunately, some angry fans mistook Rachel Roy, the fashion designer, for Rachael Ray, the Food Network
celebrity chef, and swarmed the latter’s social media accounts with angry posts and comments as well.
Once the misunderstanding was sorted out Ray lightheartedly posted a recipe for lemonade, and these fans
became the punch line of a number of internet jokes.

But just how wrong were Beyoncé fans when they confused Rachel Roy and Rachael Ray? From a purely
linguistic perspective which doesn’t consider the pop culture context, only 16.4%.

Among its suite of text analysis tools, Rosette® Text Analytics powers a name matching function which compares
two entity names(person, location, or organization) across 15 different languages and scripts,
and provides a match score of how likely it is that these two names refer to the same person.
Using the Rosette API, Roy and Ray are an 83.6% match, a respectably high match score. Compare
that to Papageno and Papagena, two distinct characters from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, who have
a match score of 89.9%.

To conjecture a bit then, this means that if Rachel Roy were on a TSA watch list, Rachael Ray
would likely get flagged for additional screening while passing through airport security.
Granted, the TSA would verify that Ray is the same person as Roy before accusing her of having an affair with Jay-Z
keeping her off her flight, but you can see how the confusion could occur.

If you thought the similarity in those two names was difficult, consider how someone might have
to deal with these scenarios:

Real world implications

Outside of this Bey-bubble, matching names is a very real problem that has far more serious repercussions
than a few nasty tweets. If you’ve heard of the term “Sharing economy” it refers to the likes of Uber and
Airbnb, companies that are revolutionizing their respective industries, where user reviews and background
checks are not enough to manage the risk involved in trusting strangers for a ride or a place to stay.

In response, Airbnb built their Verified ID feature, which verifies online IDs such as Facebook, LinkedIn,
and Google+ against passports and other government-issued IDs, Airbnb provides both hosts and travelers with
unprecedented trust in the transaction.

Learn more

Want to learn more about name matching, or compare names yourself? We’ve gone ahead and pre-filled the
live demo with Rachel/Rachael, but you can enter any two names you’d like for an immediate score.
Bonus: we’ve also updated our entity extraction demo with an article on the Beyhive’s latest
(how did Rita Ora get into the mix?!).
Check it out to see the key players in this internet drama, or enter the URL of another article you’d
like to analyze into the demo.

Rosette Text Analytics is available as an API or SDK, bringing meaning to your unstructured text data
for over 20 years. Try it out today! In the meantime, cut the Beyhive a little slack. They’re just
overzealous in the defense of their queen bee.

Lemonade, Beyoncé
Additional reading

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemonade_(Beyoncé_album)

http://read.tidal.com/article/the-formation-to-lemonade

https://www.buzzfeed.com/davidmack/she-just-wants-to-cook-brunch