5. The process of claim 1 , wherein the process action of computing the hash function that maps any personal name in a particular language and misspellings thereof to similar binary codewords, comprises the action of: inputting a set of training personal names in said particular language; segmenting each training personal name into constituent tokens, wherein each token corresponds to a word in the personal name comprising a continuous string of characters unbroken by a space and whose characters are consistent with the types of characters employed in personal names in said particular language; for each token derived from of the training personal names, inputting one or more equivalents of the token in another language or languages, wherein each of said equivalents input for a token is in a language that is different from any other input equivalent of the token, and wherein the language or languages of the one or more equivalents are the same for every token; computing a hash function that maps any token in the particular language and misspellings thereof to similar binary codewords using said tokens derived from the training personal names and said one or more equivalents of each of the tokens.
6. The process of claim 5 , wherein the process action of computing the hash function that maps any token in the particular language and misspellings thereof to similar binary codewords using said tokens derived from the training personal names and said one or more equivalents of each of the tokens, comprises the actions of: representing each token as a vector of features; representing the equivalent or equivalents of each token as a vector of features; and computing a hash function that maps the featurized version of any token in the particular language and featurized versions of misspellings of that token to similar binary codewords using said featurized tokens derived from of the training personal names and said one or more featurized equivalents of each of the tokens.