Managing synonyms

Managing synonyms

Managing synonyms is an essential task for maintaining your reference data. Clean reference data ensures your documents can be processed and validated as efficiently as possible.

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What are synonyms in Carta LP Portfolio Analytics?

Synonyms help Carta LP Portfolio Analytics understand which funds or companies appear in a document – even when a name appears in a slight variation, as abbreviation or even as a completely different name (for instance a previous trading name).
In Carta LP Portfolio Analytics, each fund or company name can have any number of synonyms. These can be added by any user during document vallidation, or directly in the reference data section

When an entity (fund or company) name appears in a document with a name variation (e.g. incomplete name, as abbreviation or as a previous trading name), then Carta LP Portfolio Analytics uses synonyms as a fallback method to identify the correct entity.

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Why you should maintain synonyms

• Increase parser accuracy – reduce need for correcting and re-parsing documents
  The platform uses synonyms to identify funds within file names, and any entity within document text

• Speed up the extraction process:
  Better entity matching mean that fewer items need to be manually edited and corrected

• Avoid duplication, keeping ref data clean

How it works

When Carta LP Portfolio Analytics processes a document in order to assign the correct funds, companies or other entities, it uses the reference data library to look up existing names. In most cases this works fine, but occasionally the document uses a variation in spelling, an abbreviation, or previous company name. By adding the right synonyms to an entity, the platform can also use those to establish a match.

You can manage synonyms in two locations:

Either on the network validation screen: select action: 'Edit synonyms'
or directly in the reference data section.

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What to aim for

• Add common name variations, e.g. for 'ACME Services Group', add synonym 'ACME Group' and 'ACME Services'; or for 'Joker Ltd', add 'Joker'

• Remove legal or other common suffixes, e.g. for entity 'Wayne Enterprises, Inc.' add synonym 'Wayne Enterprises'

• Add known abbreviations, e.g. for 'Societe Generale' add synonym 'SocGen', or for 'Wayne Enterprises Capital Partners' add 'WECP' if this is expected usage

• Previous company names, e.g. for 'abrdn', add synonym 'Aberdeen'

• Most entities will not need synonyms; for difficult cases a maximum of 4-6 synonyms should suffice

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What to avoid

• Avoid adding synonyms that are too short or too common, as these will generate matches even in unrelated text (false positives).
  E.g. for 'Total Health Enterprises (THE)' you should not add 'THE' as synonym

• Avoid adding synonyms that are too long, or extending the main asset name.
  E.g. for entity 'Wayne Enterprises', you do not need to add synonym 'Wayne Enterprises, Inc.', as the match would have been found with the original name anyway

• Avoid synonyms that are likely to match other entities as well.
  E.g. you should not add synonyms like 'enterprise', 'LP', 'LLC', 'Fund' or similar

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