This has a very specialized use, but if you need to extract names and genders from a short biographical text, try it out.
<?php
$nameFinder = new Names($my_text);
$name = $nameFinder->guessName();
$gender = $nameFinder->guessGender();
?>
It guesses purely based on number of occurrences and honorifics/pronouns/gender-nouns, so it will fail to perfom in many obvious cases. There are some better methods for dealing with this issue discussed in papers such as:
- Extracting Names from Natural-Language Text (Y. Ravin, 1997)
- Disambiguation of proper names in text (Y. Ravin, N. Wacholder, 1997)
- Extracting company names from text (L.F. Rau, 1991)
- Extracting personal names from email: Applying named entity recognition to informal text (E. Minkov, R.C. Wang, 2005)