Using Embedding Models to Improve Probabilistic Race Prediction

Estimating racial disparity requires individual-level race data, which are often unavailable due to the sensitivity of collecting such information. To address this problem, many researchers utilize Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG), which have critically relied on Census surname data. Unfortunately, these data capture race-surname relationships only for common surnames, omitting approximately 10% of the US population. We show that predictive performance degrades substantially for individuals with such omitted, uncommon surnames because standard BISG implementation relies on a uninformative generic prior in these cases. To address this limitation, we propose embedding-powered BISG (eBISG), which uses pre-trained text embeddings to represent names as dense vectors and trains neural networks on 2020 Census surname and first-name data to estimate race probabilities for names not covered in the Census. We compare five approaches: standard BISG using only surnames, BIFSG incorporating first name probabilities, surname embedding for unlisted names, surname and first name embedding combining both, and a full-name embedding trained on voter file data from Southern states that captures interactions between name components. We show that each successive eBISG approach improves race prediction, with the full-name embedding yielding the largest gains, particularly for Hispanic and Asian voters whose surnames are absent from the Census list.

Large Language Models Naively Recover Ethnicity from Individual Records

I demonstrate that large language models can infer ethnicity from names with accuracy exceeding that of Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding (BISG) without additional training data, enabling inference outside the United States and to contextually appropriate classification categories. Using stratified samples from Florida and North Carolina voter files with self-reported race, LLM-based classification achieves up to 84.7% accuracy, outperforming BISG (68.2%) on balanced samples. I test six models including Gemini 3 Flash, GPT-4o, and open-source alternatives such as DeepSeek v3.2 and GLM-4.7. Enabling extended reasoning can improve accuracy by 1-3 percentage points, though effects vary across contexts; including metadata such as party registration reaches 86.7%. LLM classification also reduces the income bias inherent in BISG, where minorities in wealthier neighborhoods are systematically misclassified as White. I further validate using Lebanese voter registration with religious sect (64.3% accuracy), Indian MPs from reserved constituencies (99.2%), and Indian land records with caste classification (74.0%). Aggregate validation across India, Uganda, Nepal, Armenia, Chile, and Costa Rica using original full-count voter rolls demonstrates that the method recovers known population distributions where naming conventions are distinctive. For large-scale applications, small transformer models fine-tuned on LLM labels exceed BISG accuracy while enabling local deployment at no cost.

EnsembleLink: Accurate Record Linkage Without Training Data

Record linkage, the process of matching records that refer to the same entity across datasets, is essential to empirical social science but remains methodologically underdeveloped. Researchers treat it as a preprocessing step, applying ad hoc rules without quantifying the uncertainty that linkage errors introduce into downstream analyses. Existing methods either achieve low accuracy or require substantial labeled training data. I present EnsembleLink, a method that achieves high accuracy without any training labels. EnsembleLink leverages pre-trained language models that have learned semantic relationships (e.g., that "South Ozone Park" is a neighborhood in "New York City" or that "Lutte ouvriere" refers to the Trotskyist "Workers' Struggle" party) from large text corpora. On benchmarks spanning city names, person names, organizations, multilingual political parties, and bibliographic records, EnsembleLink matches or exceeds methods requiring extensive labeling. The method runs locally on open-source models, requiring no external API calls, and completes typical linkage tasks in minutes.