7. A computer program product stored in computer memory, comprising functional descriptive material that, when executed by an information handling system, causes the information handling system to perform actions that include: retrieving a candidate name; identifying a cultural classification that corresponds to the candidate name; retrieving one or more culture-specific regularization rules from corresponding to the cultural classification; applying one or more of the culture-specific regularization rules to the candidate name, resulting in a regularized candidate name, wherein the applying further comprises: determining that a first regularization rule included in the one or more culture-specific regularization rules applies to the candidate name; generating a first iteration regularized candidate name by applying the first regularized rule to the candidate name; determining that a second regularization rule included in the one or more culture-specific regularization rules applies to the candidate name; and generating the regularized candidate name by applying the second regularized rule to the first iteration regularized candidate name; storing the regularized candidate name; comparing the regularized candidate name with a regularized query name; determining that the comparison meets a regularization matching threshold, which indicates a potential match between the regularized candidate name and the regularized query name; and in response to determining that comparison meets the regularization matching threshold, providing the candidate name to the user.
12. The computer program product of claim 7 wherein the cultural classification corresponds to an originating culture that is selected from the group consisting of Afghan, Anglo, Arabic, Chinese, Farsi, French, German, Hispanic, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Pakistani, Russian, Thai, Vietnamese, and Yoruban.