Classification of Galician surnames with Web Scraping

Abstract

Linguistics considers different classifications of surnames according to their motivation, morphology or semantics. In the case of Galician surnames, Boullón- Agrelo (2008) proposes a classification based on three main groups: appellatives, patronymics and toponymics. In order to classify Galician surnames in these three categories, Web Scraping techniques were used, i.e. a process of extracting content and data from websites, scraping official Galician, Spanish and even Portuguese language dictionaries. These techniques were very useful, especially for appellatives.